
Class JBX1333 

Book . $ 1 ^ K h . 

Copyrightls 10 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 






JACOB TODD. 



T 



he Kingdom of God 

is Within You 



Pulpit Talks 



By 
REV. JACOB TODD, D. D, , r , , 



3 J J )J 



With an Introduction by 
BISHOP CYRUS D. FOSS. 



P. W- ZIEGLER & CO. 

Philadelphia Chicago 






THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Copies Received 

JUL. 1 1901 

Copyright entry 

TKCLA^ CLt>, f<?*/ 

CLASS <^XXC N* 

9772, 

COPY B. 



Copyright 1901 
MARY D. TODD 



'I say to thee, do thou repeat 

To the first man thou mayest meet, 

In lane, highway, or open street, 

'That he and we and all men move 
Under a canopy of love, 
As broad as the blue sky above ; 

That doubt and trouble, fear and pain, 
And anguish, all are shadows vain, 
That death itself shall not remain ; 

'That weary deserts we may tread, 
A dreary labyrinth may thread, 
Through dark ways underground be led ; 

'Yet if we will one Guide obey, 
The dreariest path, the darkest way, 
Shall issue out in heavenly day. 

'And we on clivers shores now cast, 
Shall meet, our perilous voyage past, 
All in our Father's house at last." 

— Richard Chenevix Trench. 



NOTE. 

Dr. Holmes has said : "Poor Everybody that 
sighs for remembrance on a planet with a core of 
fire and a crust of fossils." Yet it is natural that 
those who are following after should indulge a 
longing to keep alive the memory of the true and 
good who have passed on before. 

It is with this thought mainly that these Pulpit 
Talks are given to any who may be interested in 
them. They appear very much as they were 
preached to the congregations to which their auth- 
or ministered Sunday after Sunday, and it is hoped 
that the fact that they were written to appeal di- 
rectly to the hearer, rather than the reader, will ac- 
count for and excuse imperfections in literary form. 

They have been selected with hesitation from a 
large quantity of manuscript with the hope that 
they may bear a message from a voice that is still 
to some in whose memory that voice still lingers, 
and that they may in their measure tend to 
strengthen and to stir to higher levels the hearts of 
subjects of that King who dwells in the inner life 
of His people and whose "nature and name is 
Love." M. D. T. 



SUBJECTS. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM 

THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH 

THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS 

THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS 

PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD 

NO SCRIPTURE OF PRIVATE INTERPRETATION 

THE TRANSITORY AND THE PERMANENT 

THE SIN OF AARON 

LOT'S CHOICE 

THE RESTORING OF THE WITHERED HAND 

FORGIVENESS AND LOVE 

OBJECTS OF FAITH 

FALSE CHRISTS 

THE HEAVENLY GUEST 

THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK 



INTRODUCTION. 



It has been estimated that at least two million 
sermons have been published in book form, but not 
one in a hundred of them has won a place in the 
enduring literature of the world. This remark, 
however, carries with it no implication that the ma- 
jority of those sermons were not excellent when 
preached, or that the vast multitude of sermons 
never published did not serve their real purpose. 
The true test of a sermon is hearing it, and not 
reading it in print. Very likely the sermons of John 
the Baptist or of St. Peter, if we had verbatim 
copies of them as spoken, would find no important 
place in permanent literature. 

No written words can fully reproduce the im- 
pression made by the sermons of the Rev. Dr. Jacob 
Todd, any more than that of his delightful conver- 
sation. One might almost as well attempt to de- 



scribe the fragrance of a rose or the flavor of a 
peach. The charm of his personality was in them, 
and that charm will long linger in the grateful and 
affectionate recollection of his choice friends. 

Few men's sermons can stand the ordeal of the 
printing press. The published sermons of Sum- 
merfield and Whitefield give but faint hints of the 
transcendent power of their spoken words ; but, if 
I mistake not, this volume will be found to enshrine 
and suggest the speaker's power in much larger 
proportion than sermons are wont to do. Certain 
elements of pulpit power are manifest on all its 
pages. Dr. Todd had skill in analysis, rare ability 
to grasp and set forth the central idea of a text, 
great facility in the use of brilliant metaphor and of 
more elaborate illustration, and a firm hold of the 
essential truths of the gospel, which, however, he 
never defended with a blundering bigotry, but 
always by the use of methods which appealed to 
the most intelligent opponents of the faith. 

His early style was affluent in rhetorical beauty. 
The first time I heard him speak was at the one hun- 
dredth birthday anniversary of Henry Boehm, so 
well known as the travelling companion of Bishop 
Asbury. That single address of fifteen or twenty 



minutes would have sufficed to fix his rank as a no- 
table orator. In later years his style was somewhat 
chastened by severe study, and his spiritual life was 
enriched by physical disability and suffering. I 
have never witnessed a finer triumph of mind over 
matter than his address at the funeral of his dear 
friend, Dr. McCoombs. His thin face and wasted 
form startled the friends who had not recently seen 
him; he ascended the pulpit steps with great diffi- 
culty, and could not stand without leaning on the 
desk. His first words were painfully slow and fee- 
ble, but in a few moments his spirit caught fire, and 
he poured forth a torrent of inspired thought in 
brilliant words about perfect salvation in Jesus 
Christ, consciously realized now, and about the 
immortal life as absolutely certain, close at hand, 
and verily present, vividly reminding me of the 
words, "We know . . we know . . we do know that 
we know him," in the first epistle of the beloved dis- 
ciple, and of the glorious face to face visions of the 
seer of Patmos. The two features of his religious 
thinking and of his personal spiritual life thus re- 
ferred to perpetually emerged in ever fresh forms 
in all his preaching, and will be found flashing forth 



in fine illumination on many a page in this unique 
volume. 

For some who knew him well these sermons 
will revive such scenes; they will also repay 
the careful study of many a young minister who 
never saw the benignant face of one of the notable 
preachers of the last third of the nineteenth century. 

CYRUS D, FOSS. 



The Kingdom of God. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



The Kingdom of God is not meat and drink ; but righteousness, and 
peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.— Romans XIV : 17. 



We have in this passage one truth implied and 
one clearly expressed. 

The implied truth is that a religion of cere- 
monies, while it is not true religion, is necessary in 
lifting men from their fallen state to the appre- 
hension of pure spiritual truths. Men do not leap 
at a single bound from facts to principles, nor from 
sensuality to spirituality. A blind man, aca istomed 
all his life to darkness, cannot be restored to sight 
in a moment so as to look broad daylight in the 
face at once. He must be kept in the twilight for 
a while and see men as trees walking, before he 
can come out in the day and see every man clearly. 

A child cannot be taught to read or to work out 
mathematical problems or to pursue logical pro- 
cesses at once. He must spend years in learning 
the alphabet, the Arabic numerals and the forms 
of syllogisms before he can be inducted into the 
higher studies. 

It is utterly impossible for a nation of savages 
to spring at a bound from anarchy and barbarism 



22 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

into liberty and civilization. They must first feel 
the strong hand of despotism and learn the les- 
sons of obedience to law and respect for authority 
before they are capable of self-government or sus- 
ceptible of civilization. 

A man will never see clearly in the darkened 
chamber, but he will be prepared by it for emerg- 
ing into the light by and by, where he can see. 

The child will never become a scholar by study- 
ing letters and figures and forms, but these will 
furnish him the means when his mind has become 
sufficiently matured to spell out great truths, to 
solve great problems and to arrive at far reaching 
conclusions. 

The savage will never reach high civilization and 
freedom by submission to oppression and by terror 
of authority, but these will train him to patience 
and self-command, and thus qualify him for free- 
dom and virtue when the day of his liberation shall 
come. 

The ceremonial law was our schoolmaster to 
bring us to Christ. It was not the kingdom of 
God, but it led us towards and prepared us for 
that kingdom which was yet to come. It found 
man in utter spiritual blindness and it opened his 
eyes slowly and let the light in faintly so that he 
might be able to see clearly when the true light 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 23 

should be revealed. It took the race in worse 
than childish ignorance and taught it the signs and 
symbols by which it should be able to spell out and 
decipher the deep lessons of God's truth when it 
should graduate to the school of grace. It laid 
hold of man besotted and brutalized by sin and 
thundered law in his ears and swept the scepter of 
authority before his blinking eyes in order that he 
might be prepared for citizenship when Jesus 
should set up his kingdom on the earth. 

A religion of ceremonies prepares the way for 
spirituality in two ways: In the first place it leads 
men to the contemplation of and the search after 
spiritual truths. 

The Jew did not understand the meaning of half 
that he was required to do, as thousands of Chris- 
tians to-day perform religious duties without 
understanding their deep spiritual import. He 
offered his sacrifices, performed his oblations and 
abstained from interdicted meats and drinks sim- 
ply because the command had been given, without 
catching a glimpse of the great atoning sacrifice, 
of the washing of regeneration and the sanctified 
living which were symbolized by them. But while 
he did not comprehend them he did apprehend the 
truth that they were symbols of something and 
could not help meditating upon them and inquir- 



24 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

ing after their meaning. So every man who to- 
day performs the duties of religion and goes 
through the forms of worship, while he may not 
enter into the spirit of them will be led to think 
and wonder about heavenly things and will thus be 
made better by them. Let a savage examine and 
study a telescope until he understands its use, then 
let him look through it on some cloudy night. His 
vision will not pierce the clouds, but he will readily 
guess that there is something behind them to be 
seen when the sky is clear. 

Forms, ceremonies and duties are only the mem- 
bers which make up the body of religion, but keep 
them constanly moving before a man and it will 
not be long before he will conjecture that there 
must be a soul within them somewhere and will be 
led to inquire after it. 

The search after truth is often of as much value 
to men as the truth is after it is found. The mind 
is expanded and elevated by the effort and the 
heart learns to love truth before it has discovered 
it. A religion made up only of ceremonies and a 
round of duties will lift man out of his sensuality 
and make him more heavenly minded simply by 
suggesting spiritual realities, and thus leading him 
to contemplate and search after higher truths. The 
rainbow is only a mystery at first, but by and by 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 25 

it forces the conviction that there is a sun shining 
somewhere and will send the mind along lines of 
light to find it. The shadow will suggest the sub- 
stance. 

Then in the second place a religion of cere- 
monies serves to interpret spiritual truth when it is 
revealed. A photograph is very unlike a man. It 
has no warmth, no life, no love, in it. It is only a 
collection of a few lights and shadows upon a plain 
surface. Yet somehow by studying that picture 
you will be able to recognize the person when you 
see him. So the forms of godliness have very lit- 
tle in common with its power and yet familiarity 
with the forms prepares us to recognize and appre- 
ciate the power when it falls upon us. Let a child 
be brought up in the observance of every Christian 
duty while yet he knows not the deep reason for 
their performance and by and by when faith's eagle 
eye pierces the mists and he beholds the King in 
his beauty he will recognize him in an instant as 
the unknown God whom he has ignorantly wor- 
shiped until now. 

The Jew was required to select a blemishless 
lamb from his fold as an offering to God. A blem- 
ishless man must also be set apart for the priest- 
hood to make the offering for him. This priest 
must purify himself before his offering would be 



26 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

accepted, and the altar on which the sacrifice is 
laid must be purified, or the offering will be re- 
jected. He did not understand the meaning of all 
this — it was mystery all. But when in after years 
truth was revealed that only he who is washed 
from his sins and purified by the Holy Ghost and 
who keeps himself unspotted from the world will 
be accepted of God, he saw the shadow of this 
spirit truth in every lamb, in every priest and in 
every altar of his Father's religion. He was pre- 
pared for it, he grasped it and it grasped him. 

Take a more familiar example still. A child at 
school commences the study of geography. He 
has before him only a map, a picture made up of 
colors, lines, dots and names. He has not the 
slightest idea that this picture represents the 
earth's surface and could not understand the truth 
if it were stated to him. Month after month he 
traces out crooked lines called rivers and finds dots 
called cities until at last he can tell you where each 
one of these is found upon the map. And now he 
has mastered geography, yet does not understand 
the meaning of anything he has learned. His 
knowledge will be perfectly meaningless and per- 
fectly useless to him so long as he remains in the 
school room. Let him go out into the world now 
and sail up a river,disembark at a city and ride over 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. ?7 

a mountain, and at once as the truth breaks upon 
him that the map was a picture of the world, his 
thought sweeps round our globe — he sees it dotted 
with cities, ridged with mountains, furrowed by 
rivers and washed by oceans and seas. The map 
was useless until he saw the world, but now he 
could not understand the world without it. The 
type may be all mystery while we have it alone, but 
when it is placed alongside its counterpart the type 
interprets the thing typified. God gave us a sys- 
tem of types and shadows for the double purpose 
of suggesting spiritual truths and of preparing us 
to understand and appreciate them when the light 
of the gospel should reveal them. 

But the Jewish dispensation was not intended to 
be permanent, but transitional. It was not an end 
but only a means of attaining an end. It was not 
the kingdom of God but only a territory that had 
to be crossed in order to reach the kingdom. Paul 
saw the truth when the scales had fallen from his 
eyes, and cried, "The law having the shadow of 
good things to come and not the very image of the 
things can never with those sacrifices which they 
offered year by year continually make the comers 
thereunto perfect/' 

The journey of the prodigal from the far coun- 
try back to the old homestead did not readmit him 



28 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

to the family. It brought him nearer home at 
every step but it was not until his father threw his 
arms about his neck and kissed him — not until the 
robe and ring were placed upon him — not until the 
fatted calf was killed and the old sire had said 
'This my son was dead and is alive again ; he was 
lost and is found," that he was readmitted to his 
father's house. The dispensation of ceremonies 
only brought a man to the portals of the kingdom, 
but there it must stop; it could go no further. 
This was no arbitrary regulation of the Almighty, 
but it was because in the nature of things that out- 
ward religious observances cannot make a child of 
God. 

The same thing is true to-day of every man 
whose religion consists only in acts and ceremonies 
and who performs them simply as duties. He is 
only a servant, not a son. He is very near the 
kingdom of God, but he has not entered it. He is 
still under the law though only a few steps from 
grace. Praying, singing, preaching, working, sac- 
rificing and self-denial if performed simply because 
they are commanded leave us just where the Jews 
stood when Jesus first preached the gospel to them. 
We have the form of godliness without the power ; 
we have the letter but lack the spirit. The Jew 
thought that true religion consisted in meats and 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 29 

drinks, in outward ceremonial observances; and 
there are thousands in the Christian church to-day 
who have no higher notion of God's kingdom. 
They perform their duties and say their prayers, 
and call that Christianity. The heathen and Ma- 
hometan do the same. That is not freedom. That 
is bondage. O brethren, Jesus waves his sceptre 
over a kingdom where the people do not talk about 
duties and sacrifice and crosses, but where they 
shout and sing of privilege, of opportunity and of 
enjoyment. The religion of Jesus, the reign of 
grace, the true kingdom of God, "is not meat and 
drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the 
Holy Ghost." 

This leads us to the truth clearly expressed in 
the text, viz : The spiritual nature of the Christian 
religion. 

It may seem strange at first thought that God's 
kingdom should be represented as less than univer- 
sal. We have been taught to believe that his scep- 
ter reaches to the utmost verge of creation and 
that every star that wanders through the blue mid- 
night swears allegiance to his throne. Inspired 
lips have told us "If we ascend up into heaven, God 
is there ; if we make our bed in hell, behold, he is 
there; if we take the wings of the morning and 
dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there 



3° THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

shall his hand lead us and his right hand shall hold 
us. "His kingdom ruleth over all." "In Him we 
live, move and have our being." Every act, 
thought and word of our lives is under His law. 
Yet here his kingdom is represented as excluding 
the material universe, as having nothing to do with 
the actions and words of men, but as comprising 
only moral principles and emotions, righteousness, 
peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. 

The truth is, the boundaries of God's kingdom 
contract within narrower limits just as men rise 
higher and higher in spiritual conceptions. An 
earthly monarch is called king of all his realm, and 
so he is in a low, coarse sense, but in a much high- 
er and truer sense he is king of his people. So 
God is king of all this universe, but men and not 
dead matter are the chief subjects of his govern- 
ment. But there is still a kingdom within the 
human empire. God aims not so much to rule 
over our bodies as to reign in our spirit. Not our 
outward acts and words but our internal thoughts 
and affections are the immediate surroundings of 
His throne. "The kingdom of God cometh not 
with observation, neither shall they say, lo, here, 
or lo, there, for behold the kingdom of God is with- 
in you." All worlds are under the government of 
the Great King, but they are only provinces, sub- 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 31 

jects held in vassalage, the human heart is the seat 
of government, the central kingdom, the place 
where the King has his throne and holds his court. 

The one all-comprehending principle of this in- 
ner spiritual government is righteousness. This 
is more than simple justice. When a man exacts 
no more than his due and pays all that he owes, 
when he gives full weight and measure in all his 
business transactions with his fellows, we call him 
a just or righteous man. But it is easy to see 
that such a definition would fall far short of justice 
in the sight of God. No man can be just who 
does not meet all his obligations and satisfy all 
claims against him. But men are not our only 
creditors and our liabilities cannot all be paid in 
coin. We have dealt heavily in the commerce of 
another world, we have been redeemed, "not with 
corruptible things such as silver and gold, but with 
the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ." We 
owe our all to God. We are bankrupt all, and 
when we have surrendered ourselves with all we 
have and are to God, we have only met the de- 
mands of simple justice. 

Righteousness is broader than justice. It does 
not ask what claim another has upon us but simply 
what is right to be done under the circumstances. 
Justice has no claim upon charity, it cannot exact 



32 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

mercy at my hands, it makes no demand upon my 
affections. But righteousness sends me with gifts 
to the door of want; it stays my hand when I 
would take just vengeance upon a fallen foe, and 
it bids me illuminate all my acts with the light of 
love. There is a department of justice in God's 
kingdom, but that is not the whole of the govern- 
ment. Not what I owe but what is right is the 
measure of Christian living. 

But righteousness goes even deeper than this. 
A man might do not only what justice required, 
but all that was right to be done, and yet never 
have penetrated into the spirituality of the Chris- 
tian religion. A child might obey all his father's 
commands, but do it through fear or from hope of 
reward and then he would only be a servant and 
not a son. True filial affection would lift him 
above both rewards and punishments to find de- 
light in doing his father's will simply because it is 
his will. A mathematical problem was once given 
to the public in France, and the prize offered to the 
man who would solve it was a seat in the French 
Academy of Science. A young man rushed into 
the presence of Lamartine one day exclaiming, "I 
have solved the problem, I have won the prize." 
The great Frenchman quietly asked, "Why did you 
solve the problem?" "Why, to obtain the seat in 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 33 

the Academy," replied the youth. "Then you are 
unworthy of it," said Lamartine, "for no man de- 
serves a seat in the halls of learning but he who 
studies from the love of truth." 

A man must not only do what is right, but do it 
because it is right in order to rise to sonship in 
God's family or to obtain a seat in God's kingdom. 
The righteousness of the gospel is not simply the 
doing and saying of right things ; all this might be 
done from low, sordid motives ; but it is the doing 
right from the love of right. God looks not at the 
outward man but requires truth in the inward parts. 
O, there is a lofty freedom in this kingdom. The 
man who enters this realm is not bound by com- 
mandments or goaded by duties. He loves the 
right for its own sake and does it because he loves 
it and finds sweetest enjoyment in the doing. The 
law of righteousness, when we get it in us and get 
ourselves enveloped in it, becomes "the perfect 
law of liberty." Near the throne in God's king- 
dom men are all free; as they wander from the 
throne they become servants, vassals and slaves. 

The second characteristic of the Christian reli- 
gion is Peace. "The work of righteousness is 
peace and the effect of righteousness is quietness 
and assurance forever." It is easy to see that 
righteousness ruling in the kingdoms of this world 



34 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

would hush the sound of battle and robe the world 
in peace. Let this principle mount the throne and 
rule in the thought and actions of men and nations, 
and war's blood-smeared countenance would never 
grin over murdered armies and smouldering cities, 
but peace instead would wave her green olive 
branches from shore to shore. 

But the peace spoken of in the text is not that 
of nations but the inner calm of the soul. Man's 
spirit troubled and tossed by sin seeks quiet and 
rest everywhere, but seeks them in vain until Jesus 
breathes his own righteousness into the soul and 
whispers, "Peace, be still," then, and not until then 
there comes a great calm. In vain do men offer 
costly sacrifices, in vain do they swing before the 
altar the incense burdened censer, in vain do they 
unbosom themselves at the confessional and per- 
form their penances; in vain do they fly to the 
monastery and the hermitage ; in vain do they ab- 
stain from meat and drink and perform all the out- 
ward duties of religion. Peace of soul is not found 
here. God's kingdom is peace, but we are not in 
it until Christ is in us. Not until we catch the spir- 
it of his righteousness and incarnate it does the 
calm of the divine nature settle down upon the 
soul. "If any man have not the spirit of Christ he 
is none of his." Would any man have soul rest? 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 35 

then let him get soul righteousness. The con- 
sciousness of being right will give him peace of 
soul though all the world were in arms against 
him. Paul and Silas were in prison at Philippi, in 
the dungeon, with their feet fast in the stocks at 
the midnight hour. The jailer stood without, 
clothed with authority, with the keys of the prison 
in his girdle and with a sword at his side. But 
Paul and Silas knew they were right and the jailer 
had a troublesome suspicion that he was in the 
wrong. The earthquake came but it did not dis- 
turb the peace of God's servants; they only sang 
the louder. But the jailer trembled like an aspen, 
for there was an earthquake within him, and cried, 
"What must I do to be saved?" I would rather be 
right and in a dungeon than be wrong and on a 
throne. The peace for which the world is sighing 
is not to be found in our surroundings but dwells 
like a twin sister with righteousness in the soul. 
The kingdom of God is first righteousness, and it 
is then peace, deep, abiding, eternal peace. 

And finally, it is joy in the Holy Ghost. This 
declaration stands in bold contrast to the common 
opinion that in order to be a Christian one must 
wear a long face and be melancholy. Somehow 
the notion obtains that if a man desires enjoyment 
he must keep out of church. Men talk of enjoy- 
3 



36 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

ing themselves while they are young and full of 
spirit, and of settling down to a religious life when 
age has cooled the blood and thrown a shadow 
over life. All such notions are based upon the false 
assumption that the kingdom of God is one of 
gloom and not of gladness, that it is a land covered 
with nightshade and cypress, where flowers never 
bloom and birds never sing. There never was a 
sadder mistake. The kingdom of God is all radi- 
ant with the dimpled smiles and rings with the 
merry laughter of little children, for Jesus said, "of 
such is the kingdom of heaven." It is not a land 
of silence and gloom, but one of sunshine and blos- 
soms and song. If any man on earth has a right 
to be happy it is that man who can look out over 
the world and say, "These green fields and hills are 
my Father's possessions ;" who can look up to yon- 
der blue arch and say "That star-gemmed temple 
is my Father's house. I am an heir of God and a 
joint heir with Jesus Christ." Where God frowns 
there is darkness and tears, where he smiles there 
is light and joy. There may be feverish excite- 
ment and thoughtless hilarity outside of the king- 
dom, but they are thorny flowers which leave the 
hand wounded and bleeding that plucks them. Joy 
sweet, substantial, fadeless, is a blossom that bursts 
only under the shadow of the throne. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 37 

But mark you, it is joy in the Holy Ghost. We 
must not go outside the church and beyond the 
influence of the Holy Spirit to find our enjoyment; 
we must seek it in the Holy Ghost, in spirit com- 
munions, in the work to which the Holy Ghost 
prompts us and in the triumphs of the cross 
achieved by the sword of the Spirit. The religion 
of Jesus does not send its disciples out into the 
world for enjoyment, into questionable amuse- 
ments such as the dance and the dice, the theatre 
and the race course. A deeper and more lasting 
enjoyment is supplied us right in our Father's 
house. We may revel in joy and gladness such as 
angels know without leaving the side of Christ or 
grieving the Holy Spirit. The man who finds lit- 
tle enjoyment in religion may be certain that it is 
because he has so little of it. He who has gotten 
fairly into God's kingdom, who has wrapped him- 
self up in Christ's righteousness and wrapped the 
righteous spirit of Christ up within his own soul, 
who is at peace both with God and man, will find a 
rapture of soul in the worship and service of God 
which rises as high above the joy of the world as 
the snow white peak of Mont Blanc towers above 
the dusky pyramids of the Nile. The disciples once 
in their concern for their Master's comfort pro- 
posed to procure him food. Said Jesus, "I have 



3« THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

meat to eat that ye know not of." They had not 
yet penetrated far enough into the kingdom to un- 
derstand that saying and they questioned among 
themselves whether some one had secretly brought 
him food. Then said Jesus, "My meat is to do the 
will of him that sent me and to finish his work." 
The devil once feigned concern for Christ's welfare 
and proposed to him to turn stones into bread. 
Jesus replied, "Man shall not live by bread alone 
but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God." It is our privilege to penetrate so 
deeply into the kingdom of God, to share so per- 
fectly the nature of Christ as to enter into the very 
joy of our Lord. Just in degree as we become like 
Christ will the world loose its hold upon us and will 
it became our meat and drink to do our Master's 
will. 



The Seed of the Kingdom, 



THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 

So is the Kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; 
and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and 
grow up, he knoweth not how.— Mark IV : 26-27. 

Christ was not educated in the schools ; notwith- 
standing he grew in wisdom while he grew in stat- 
ure. He was a close student all through his earth- 
ly life, but he studied not the pages written by men, 
but the great book of God which lay open all 
around him. The waving grass, the nodding lily, 
the vine, the fig-tree, and the birds of the air all 
photographed themselves upon his soul and furn- 
ished him material for far-reaching reflection and 
profoundest moral teaching. To the fact of his 
never having learned letters we owe the incompar- 
able parables of the gospel. Had he been a student 
of books his illustrations of divine truth had natur- 
ally been drawn from them. The books which were 
extant in his day have most of them long since per- 
ished, and had the gospels abounded in allusions to 
them, the New Testament would to-day be a 
locked book with the key forever lost. 

But nature, like its great author, is "the same 
yesterday, to-day and forever," and an illustration 
drawn from any fact or process in nature loses 

41 



42 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 

nothing by the lapse of time ; it will be understood 
equally everywhere, and will be comprehended 
alike by the learned and the ignorant. In most of 
the parables of our Lord the works of God are 
made to explain the word of God, the book of na- 
ture is employed as a commentary upon the book 
of revelation. For this reason the parables are the 
simplest and least liable to be misunderstood of all 
our Lord's teachings. We have only to take the 
facts, the laws and the processes in nature men- 
tioned in the parable, give them a spiritual inter- 
pretation and then apply them to our own souls 
and we have the lesson which the Master designed 
to teach. 

In the parable which constitutes our text the 
planting of seed in the earth and the processes by 
which it is matured for the harvest are used to il- 
lustrate the operations of divine grace in the soul 
and point out the process by which man rises from 
the earthy to a fitness for the garner of God. The 
Master points out just three particulars in which 
he declares the seed and the soil to be analagous to 
grace and the soul, viz. : In the sowing, in the 
growing, and in the garnering. 

"So is the kingdom of God," says our Lord, "as 
if a man should cast seed into the ground." In 
other words, God's kingdom does not spring up 



THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 43 

spontaneously in a human soul, it is not a plant in- 
digenous to this soil,it is not a latent germ slumber- 
ing in human nature that only needs culture and 
development. A seed from a purer clime must be 
buried in these corrupt hearts of ours if they are 
ever to bring forth fruits of holiness. Any field left 
to itself, no matter how well watered by the rain 
and warmed by the sun, will produce vastly more 
briers and thorns and weeds than it will grain ; and 
so any human soul, however great its culture and 
however favorable its surroundings, if left to its 
own natural bent will run into more evil than good. 
'The heart of man is deceitful above all things and 
desperately wicked." "The carnal mind is enmity 
against God, it is not subject to the law of God 
neither indeed can be." "Who can bring a clean 
thing out of an unclean? not one." No shuttles of 
earth however cunning and swift, are capable of 
weaving the robes of heaven. 

Because of false notions upon this point there is 
much erroneous teaching abroad and many fruit- 
less efforts in religion. But too often men strive 
to become Christlike by lopping off their sinful 
habits, by severing themselves from ungodly asso- 
ciations and then by devoting themselves to pious 
meditation and charitable deeds. We hear a great 
deal about education, culture and development in 



44 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 

religion as though the root of the matter were al- 
ready within us and only needed favoring circum- 
stances to spring up and yield fruits of holiness. 
All such religion ignores the supernatural alto- 
gether. It needs no prayer to God and asks no 
assistance of the Holy Spirit. It is human in its 
origin and needs only human means for its unfold- 
ing and perfection. A man may establish a gov- 
ernment in and over himself by which he will so 
restrain his natural dispositions that his life shall 
be moral and exemplary. But that is not the king- 
dom of God, that is his own empire. A religion 
born of man gets its reward in the praise of men. 
Human in its origin it is also human in its end. 

In the kingdom of God there is much of culture 
and development; but it is the culture and, devel- 
opment of a divinely implanted seed. There is vast 
growth and unfolding in true religion, but it is the 
growth and expansion not of an old life but of a 
new. The children of the kingdom are not simply 
the children of wrath re-baptized or clad in new 
garments; they are a new creation, they are all 
born again 'not of the flesh nor of the will of man 
but of God." A new life must be deposited in the 
soul by the divine parent if we are ever to grow up 
the children of God. 



THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 45 

The religion of Jesus is a new seed planted in an 
old soil. The soil may be very corrupt and may 
have nourished all kinds of noxious weeds, but the 
seed and not the soil will determine the character 
of the future plant. A single seed is dropped in a 
reeking marsh. By laws which we little under- 
stand that seed sends out its root like antennae to 
lay hold upon the corruption and mud around it. 
These it transforms and appropriates and by its 
accumulation rises in a stately stalk; then it un- 
folds in green and graceful leaves and then blos- 
soms out into a snow white lily. It was not the 
marsh that made the lily, but the seed that wove 
corruption into spotless purity. Human nature 
can never be moulded by human hands and natural 
laws into the Christlike, but if God drop the seed 
of eternal life into the soul there is no nature so 
vile but the divine germ will transform it into the 
likeness of God. 

When we talk of culture and development every 
thing depends upon what we are going to cultivate 
and develop. Is it the old soil with the growth 
indigenous to it? then our harvest will be tares. 
Would we have golden grain, we must get the seed 
from above. The very first step in religion is the 
implantation of a new life in the soul through the 
operation of the Holy Ghost. 



46 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 

In explaining a kindred parable Jesus says, "The 
seed is the word of God." But let no one suppose 
that a careful study of God's word and the en- 
shrinement of its truths in our memories is all that 
is meant by this passage. The seed of the king- 
dom is not a word of God, but the word of 
God. It is not a truth buried in the soul, but 
the truth. It is not a divine life, it is the 
life of God. We call a biography the life of a man. 
We do not mean that it is really his life, but only 
the record of his life. And so we call the Bible the 
word of God, but it is only the record of the life 
and teachings of the Word of God while upon 
earth. "In the beginning was the Word and the 
Word was with God and the Word was God * * * 
and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us 
and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only 
begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." 
The seed is the Word, and the Word is the Lord 
Jesus Christ. He is also "The Life, the Truth and 
the Way and no man cometh to the Father but by 
him." The planting of the seed is the having 
"Christ formed within us the hope of glory." 

It is mystery all and would not be like God if it 
were otherwise. We may not comprehend how 
Jesus can dwell in human hearts, but if the divine 
life can wrap itself up in the babe of Bethlehem and 



THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 47 

can grow and expand in the man of sorrow and 
acquainted with grief, then the same divine life 
can be planted as a germ in our natures and can 
unfold into "the image of the heavenly." Though 
the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him yet 
there is a sense in which each human heart can. We 
are not in God's kingdom until Christ is in us. 
Says Paul to the Corinthians, "Know ye not your 
own selves how that Jesus Christ is in you except 
ye be reprobates?" The planting of the seed is 
the admitting Jesus into the soul and this is the 
first step in our progress home to the kingdom of 
God. But the beginning of a religious life is not 
the end of it. There must first be a sowing, but 
there must next be a growing or there will be no 
harvest. 

THE GROWING. 
The text says "So is the kingdom of God as if a 
man should cast seed into the ground and should 
sleep and rise night and day and the seed should 
spring and grow up, he knoweth not how." It is 
assumed that the man did all he could to prepare 
the ground for the reception of the seed. There 
was some clearing and ploughing and harrowing 
necessary before it was ready for sowing, and with- 
out which the seed had never taken root. The 



4§ THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 

ground had to be broken up thoroughly and 
turned upside down before it could receive the 
seed. But the grain once sown nothing remains 
for the farmer to do but to keep down the weeds 
and wait. 

So the human soul needs to be thoroughly brok- 
en up and turned upside down before the life of 
God can find a lodgment in it. The ploughshare 
of repentence must furrow the old nature deeply 
before the new can take root in it. But the soul 
once born anew needs little assistance from human 
hands to develop into the image of Him who 
created it. All the skill of our race cannot make 
one blade of grass or ear of corn, though any man 
can crush the grass beneath his feet and destroy 
the golden grain. In grace as in nature anybody 
can mar God's work but none can reconstruct it, 
much less create it anew. There is a great deal 
of talk about developing the Christian life within 
us and, properly understood, there is no objection 
to the expression, but after all, what does any man 
do towards moulding himself into the Christly? 
Just about what the farmer can do in his field — he 
can keep down the weeds and give the buried germ 
a chance. The future harvest is all locked up in 
the seed and all it asks at the hands of the hus- 
bandman is to take all obstructions away, and 



THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 49 

God's sun and rain will lift it out of its grave and 
make it stand a thing of beauty upon the earth and 
at last will crown it with a coronet of gold. 

All the young convert can do toward becoming 
a mature saint is just to give the life of God which 
is swelling within him, a fair chance to grow. 
Tears will not wash out the stains of sin; pen- 
ances will not purify his affections, and all the 
deeds of the law and the gospel will not stamp the 
divine impress upon him. Holy exercises are es- 
sential to growth in grace, and as we hope to be- 
come like Christ we must be faithful in their per- 
formance. But they help to unfold the divine life 
within us, not by nourishing it, but by removing 
obstructions from it. The cares of this world and 
the deceitfulness of riches are pressing coldly and 
heavily down upon our hearts to choke the life 
within. When we go to our closets to commune 
with God we shut the world out and let the divine 
sunlight stream down into our hearts to quicken 
and expand our better nature ; and when out in the 
world, if like our Master we go about doing good, 
every time we lift a burden from human shoulders 
we lift a clod from our own souls which enables the 
Christlike to rise higher within us. It is not the 
prayer or deed of mercy that makes us better, but 
God who works in us "to will and to do of his own 
good pleasure/' 



50 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 

The conditions of salvation are one thing and its 
cause is another. Salvation is of grace, not of 
works lest any man should boast. "By the deeds 
of the law shall no man be justified." Our right- 
eousness is only as filthy rags before God. There 
is so much of impurity in our very best deeds that 
they could never give us a meetness for heaven. 
O, it is a precious truth that religion is a heaven 
implanted life and a heaven unfolded life and that 
it is placed beyond the reach of human hands, v/ith 
their polluting touch. What if when this mortal 
covering is stripped off we should stand as pho- 
tographs of all that we had done and thought and 
felt since our conversion ! Think you God would 
recognize his child in such a caricature? The like- 
ness of Jesus is so fine a thing that no human truth 
must touch it. God's hand must not only sketch 
it in the soul at conversion, but the same hand must 
fill up that sketch day after day until it is com- 
plete and entire, wanting nothing. We can keep 
the shadows off the canvas and keep the clods off 
the grain but we can neither paint the picture nor 
make the seed grow. 

Man has his work to perforin and God has his. 
God can help us in what we have to do, but we 
cannot assist him. The seed once planted in the 
ground it sprung up and grew the farmer knew 



THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 51 

not how. The soul born from above rises day af- 
ter day in the majesty of its Maker, and who can 
tell how? 'The kingdom of God cometh not with 
observation." We kneel at the foot of the throne 
and look up and wait for the King to appear and 
ere we know it he is seated in our souls. 

I go to God with a soul burdened with sorrow 
and sin. I kneel in his presence and pray and try 
to believe, but my prayer and faith I know do not 
take away my guilt and sin. Prayer lifts me up 
nearer God and every time faith knits her muscles 
in a fresh hold upon the promises I feel some huge 
doubt roll from my oppressed soul, but the sin and 
guilt are there still. By and by a tide which I 
cannot see washes all my stains away and I rise jus- 
tified and exultant. But how the blood of Jesus 
Christ cleanses us from all sin I do not know. I 
am certain that the harvests grow, but I do not 
know how for I cannot understand the secret 
springs of vegetable life. The fact of our conver- 
sion and growth in grace we can assuredly know, 
but the how we shall never understand until we 
know as we are known. "The wind bloweth where 
it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof but 
canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it go- 

eth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit.' 
4 



& 



52 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 

The parable further indicates the conditions un- 
der which this mysterious growth progresses most 
steadily. The man is said to sleep and rise night 
and day while the seed is springing and growing he 
knows not how. The intimation seems to be that 
he slept by night and rose betimes and went about 
his toil doing the work that his hand found to do 
without distressing himself with doubts as to 
whether nature would do its work. Having cleared 
the ground and sowed the seed, his work there was 
done and so he seeks a field of labor somewhere 
else, and while he is intent upon his daily task 
scarcely thinking whether the seed which he sowed 
is taking root, it springs up and grows without his 
knowledge. O could we but learn the lesson of 
the parable and like him faithfully do our own 
work, trusting God to take care of what belongs to 
him, the harvest of spiritual life would be much 
more abundant. We don't grow any faster by 
constantly watching the work of grace within. A 
man does not preserve his health and grow strong 
by spending his time before the glass examining 
his tongue and by feeling his pulse to detect symp- 
toms of disease, but by manly exercise out in the 
open air. And so in spiritual life it is not the man 
who is constantly analyzing his feelings and dis- 



THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 53 

secting his motives and watching his heart, who 
grows up a giant in the Lord, but the man who 
having given God his heart leaves God to take care 
of it while he bends all his energies in accomplish- 
ing the work which God has given him to do. 
Don't trouble yourselves about the work of grace, 
that is God's work and he does his work well. But 
rise early and look well to the deeds of charity and 
mercy and justice — these God has given as your 
life task — and while you are doing faithfully your 
work, the seed will spring and grow up you will not 
know how. Jesus has said elsewhere, "If any man 
will save his life he shall lose it, but if any man will 
lose his life for my sake, the same shall find it." Go 
break up the fallow soil for your neighbor and help 
him sow the seeds of eternal life and the harvest 
will be ripening in your own field all the while. 

THE GARNERING. 
The parable concludes by saying, "When the 
fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in 
the sickle because the harvest is come." There 
has been not a little conjecture in regard to the 
meaning of this clause and some have concluded 
that the Savior here teaches that as soon as a man 
reaches maturity in grace, in that moment he 
dies and is gathered to the garner of God. If the 



54 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 

Master had given us an enigma instead of a para- 
ble such a solution might be admissible, for an 
enigma requires that every member shall have its 
counterpart in the answer, but a parable is a simple 
illustration of a truth and must not be pressed be- 
yond the evident intention of the author. Now, 
the unquestioned drift of this parable is to teach 
men after having given God their heart, to apply 
themselves to the discharge of Christian duty, do- 
ing what their hands find to do with their might, 
leaving the work of grace within to take care of 
itself. The assurance given is that while they are 
working for Christ and for souls regardless of self 
unconsciously they are rising in the likeness of 
their Lord; and now the simple and natural con- 
clusion is that when such a life is over these men 
shall reap a rich reward. They did not spend their 
time watching their own harvest, but it ripened 
none the less. They did not know how it grew, 
but it did rise first into the blade, then the 
ear and then the full corn in the ear. At last 
when the harvest time comes and others gather 
their grain they thrust in their sickle and find gold- 
en treasures that they dreamed not of. Elsewhere 
Jesus teaches that people will be surprised at the 
judgment day at the reward which awaits them. 
The judge will turn to those on his right hand and 



THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 5$ 

say, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the 
kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of 
the world; for I was an hungered and ye gave me 
meat, I was thirsty and ye gave me drink, I was a 
stranger and ye took me in ; naked and ye clothed 
me ; I was sick and ye visited me ; I was in prison 
and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous 
answer him saying, Lord, when saw we thee an 
hungered and fed thee? or thirsty and gave thee 
drink? When saw we thee a stranger and took 
thee in, or naked and clothed thee? or when saw 
we thee sick or in prison and came unto thee? And 
the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I 
say unto you inasmuch as ye have done it unto one 
of the least of these my brethren ye have done it 
unto me." They had been doing the Lord's work 
without thinking about their reward. Their har- 
vest had grown up they knew not how, but when 
the reaping time came their sickles were not idle 
nor empty, God does not ask a man to work in 
his field for nothing but he does require that he 
shall go about his work without all the time think- 
ing of his pay. He may get very little reward in 
this life, but oh, the harvest time is coming. Chris- 
tianity means sacrifice here and reward hereafter. 
Let a man trust his Lord till his work is done, and 



$6 THE SEED OF THE KINGDOM. 

then to his amazement he will find that the whole 
harvest which he grew for his Master is given him 
for his wages and heaven will be piled high with 
golden sheaves of blessing. 



The Head of the Church. 



THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 

And he is the head of the body, the church.— Col. I : 18. 

Few words in the English language have been 
used with such a variety of signification as the word 
church. We sometimes speak of the church when 
we mean nothing more than the building in which 
people meet for worship. Again we use the same 
word to designate the people collectively who stat- 
edly meet in any given place for worship. Some- 
times we speak of the church meaning by that 
term all the congregations who believe in the same 
creed, and who practice the same forms of worship, 
together with all the institutions under the control 
of that denomination. Thus when we speak of the 
Methodist Church, or of the Presbyterian Church, 
or of the Baptist Church, we mean, not only all the 
people of these different denominations, but also 
their houses of worship, their colleges, their pub- 
lishing establishments, their missionary society, 
and all their other charitable institutions. 

Again, we often give a much wider significa- 
tion than even this to the word. We speak of the 
church, and mean, by that term, to embrace all de- 

59 



6o THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 

nominations of Christians the wide-world over, to- 
gether with all the machinery and appliances for 
sustaining and propagating the Christian religion 
that are anywhere possessed and employed by 
Christian people. 

Few men in this day, are so narrow-minded as 
to believe that Christ's church is bounded by any 
denominational line; and when, therefore, men 
speak of the church as opposed to the world, they 
mean all who bear the name of Christ, together 
with all that they have consecrated to his cause. 

We sometimes rise to a conception of the church 
still higher than this. When we speak of the 
Church of the First-born in Heaven we mean not 
only all who now profess the name of Christ on 
earth, but also all who have ever lived and died in 
the faith, and all who ever shall. 

The church in this broad sense, however, is sel- 
dom a unit in our conceptions. It exists in our 
minds as a compound made up of two very distinct 
if not very different parts. By qualifying the word 
we make it designate one or the other of these 
parts. We speak of the church militant as some- 
thing very distinct from the church triumphant. 

Even the church on earth is very vaguely defined 
in our minds, for we separate it into the visible and 
invisible, while we can neither fix- the limit of the 
one nor the other. 



THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 61 

Before we can understand the import of much 
of the gospel, we must understand clearly and defi- 
nitely what is meant by the church. It would be 
vain to seek its meaning in philology, for words 
have no fixed meaning, but signify anything that 
common usage makes them. 

We are not concerned to know what the word 
signified in any given age of the world; for this 
would be simply to ascertain what the conceptions 
of men were at that time respecting the church. 
We are deeply concerned, however, to know what 
God means by the church; and this can only be 
learned from the Holy Scriptures. Turn we then 
to the Bible. First : It does not mean a building 
for purposes of religious worship. The scriptures 
informed us that Jacob once left Beersheba and 
journeyed toward Haran. Night overtook him on 
the journey and with stones for his pillow he laid 
him down and slept. In his sleep he dreamed "and 
beheld a ladder set up on the earth and the top of 
it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of 
God ascending and descending on it. And be- 
hold the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the 
Lord God of Abraham, thy father, and the God of 
Isaac; the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I 
give it, and to thy seed, and behold I am with thee 
and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, 



62 THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 

and will bring thee again into this land; for I will 
not leave thee until I have done that which 
I have spoken to thee of. Jacob awoke 
with the dream still burning in his soul, and 
he was afraid and exclaimed, "How dreadful is this 
place ; this is none other but the house of God, and 
this is the gate of heaven." God's house was there 
upon the barren plain, where there was neither 
minaret, nor walls, nor floors, nor ceiling. As it 
was then, so it is now. God's church is not made 
of stone or brick, or wood, or canvas, but wherever 
he and his children meet, there is his house. Jesus 
and his apostles all exhorted the church, long be- 
fore the foundation stones of the first Christian 
temple were laid. Burn down every Christian 
house of worship upon the earth to-day, and the 
Church of Jesus Christ, like the three Hebrew 
children, would come out of the flames unhurt, 
without even the smell of fire upon her garments. 

Again, the Church of God is not identical with 
any religious organization. It is true, the scrip- 
tures speak of the Seven Churches of Asia, mean- 
ing thereby seven congregations of Christians ; but 
they also speak of the church in the house of Aquil- 
la and Priscilla ; of the church in Nymphas' house, 
and of the church in the house of Philemon. In 
these cases, they evidently mean something less 



THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 63 

than any organization known by that name in our 
day. A pious household, however small, makes a 
church in the scripture sense. 

But then the sacred writers often use the word in 
a sense wider far than religious denomination. The 
Apostolic Church was very early divided into sects ; 
and one said he was of Paul, another of Apollos, 
and another of Cephas ; but Paul grouped them all 
together into one church, and said they were all of 
Christ. Differences in regard to non-essential 
doctrines, differences in the forms of church gov- 
ernment, differences of nationality and race have 
nothing to do in fixing the boundaries of Christ's 
Church. Here "there is neither Jew nor Greek, 
there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male 
nor female, for they are all one in Christ Jesus." 

The Church of Christ is smaller than any single 
congregation, and it is larger than any one denom- 
ination. 

But again, Christ's church is not coincident with 
the aggregate of all religious denominations; and 
hence his church in heaven will differ in its mem- 
bership from the visible church on earth. All who 
are members of the church visible are not recog- 
nized by Christ as his disciples. Even in the days 
of his flesh, when there was so little temptation to 
hypocrisy, there were some names on the church 



64 THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 

roll that were not found in the Lamb's book of 
Life. Judas was numbered with the twelve at the 
moment that he sold his Master for the thirty 
pieces of silver. John tells us of certain members 
of the early church who went out from among 
them, but he says 'They were not of us." They 
were all members of the church as it appeared to 
men, but not as it was seen by God. 

But while the invisible church excludes some 
who are members of the visible church, it will in- 
clude others whose names have never been upon a 
church record on earth. Whether the number ex- 
cluded will be greater than the number added to it 
we do not know and hence we cannot tell whether 
the invisible will be greater or less than the visible 
church. While the Savior nowhere indicates the 
number or proportion of his true followers who are 
outside the visible church, his language seems to 
imply that they are not few. Said he, "Other sheep 
I have which are not of this fold, them also I must 
bring; and they shall hear my voice, and there shall 
be one fold and one shepherd." Peter said re- 
specting a man who was identified with no church 
organization, that "God is no respecter of persons, 
but in every nation he that feareth him, and work- 
eth righteousness, is accepted with him." 



THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 65 

It is clear, we think, from the foregoing reasons 
and passages from scripture, that the Church of 
Christ does not exactly coincide with any or all or- 
ganizations which are called by that name among 
men. What then is the Church of Christ? If we 
search in scripture for the central idea — that which 
is common to all the representations of the church 
— we shall find it to be vital union with Christ. The 
manner of its constitution differs from that of any 
other association on earth. Men are not elected 
to membership here by the suffrages of their fel- 
lows. No price can purchase admission. A be- 
lief in common with Church members in the car- 
dinal doctrines of Christianity does not entitle us 
to seats in their midst. Pilgrimages of penance or 
a life of morality will not number us with Christ's 
disciples. We are not linked together by a com- 
mon sentiment, by a common price, by a common 
creed, or by a common morality, but by a common 
union with Christ. Our place in an organization 
does not determine our relation to Christ, but our 
relation to Him establishes our right to a place in 
His church. Christ is the door of the sheepfold, 
and to be members of His flock we must enter by 
Him. We may get into the visible church through 
other channels, but never into the invisible. "Who- 
soever climbeth up by any other way, the same is a 



66 THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 

thief and a robber." There is all the difference be- 
tween an ordinary association for religious pur- 
poses and the church that there is between an au- 
tomaton and a living man. The one is wired to- 
gether by creeds and ceremonies; the other is 
welded together by the fires of an all-pervading life. 

In the text, the church is represented as a human 
body, with Christ as the head. His thoughts, His 
will, His life, are the bond of union between all the 
members. Sever the connection between any mem- 
ber and the head, and, no matter how nearly it may 
stand related to other living members, it will be- 
come paralyzed, will wither and die. Organic 
union amounts to nothing in the body if there be 
no vital union with the head ; so visible connection 
with Christ's church is powerless to make us His 
disciples ; it is His life alone that can make us living 
members of His mystical body. 

Elsewhere Jesus represents Himself as the vine, 
and His true followers as the branches, and em- 
phatically tells us that we can only bear fruit by 
abiding in Him. The union here is not mechanical 
simply. You may graft a thousand branches into 
the vine, and dove-tail them never so closely, but 
if the life of the vine flow not through them, they 
will not be of it, though they are in it. They will 
be fruitless and dead, though united to the same 



THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 67 

vine with other branches that are waving their 
green leaves and purple clusters all around them. 
It is getting so near to Christ that every throb of 
His great heart sends His life gushing through 
every avenue of our being — that makes us mem- 
bers of His church. 

Once the church is spoken of under the figure 
of a building, in which each member is represented 
as constituting a stone, Jesus Christ Himself be- 
ing the head of the corner, "in whom all the build- 
ing, fitly framed together, groweth unto a holy 
temple in the Lord. In whom ye also are builded 
together for a habitation of God through the 
spirit." A careless reader might get the idea that 
the union here spoken of was merely association 
for religious purposes. The stones in a temple 
have no higher union than juxtaposition; and if 
men are to be brought together in a similar way to 
form a temple for God, it is only necessary in or- 
der to constitute the church that men should join 
hands for holy purposes. As if to guard against 
this very error, Peter says we must come to Christ 
as unto a living stone, disallowed, indeed, of men, 
but chosen of God and precious. "Ye also," he 
says, "as lively stones are built up a spiritual 
house." In other words, the Church of Christ 
would be like a temple if all its stones were alive, 



68 THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 

and if their life all gushed forth from the great 
corner stone and flowed alike from foundation to 
the giddiest pinnacle. 

I am not certain that Peter does not here refer 
to the mysterious law by which minerals arrange 
their particles, in well defined geometrical figures 
in crystalization. There is a kind of life in a stone, 
that, when its particles are in a state which ren- 
ders motion easy, will arrange them, with inimit- 
able skill, into cube or pyramid or rhomb or prism. 
The crystaline structure might be called, with lit- 
tle impropriety, the living stone, in contradistinc- 
tion to the shapeless mass of uncrystaline structure. 
If this be the Apostle's meaning, the figure then 
teaches that, as the particles in a crystal are ar- 
ranged and held together by some mysterious life- 
force, so the church, built upon the Rock of Ages, 
is nothing more than the crystalization of human 
hearts around their Savior through the mysterious 
life energy of Jesus Christ. 

Even when the church is represented under the 
figure of a sheepfold, this central idea undergoes 
very little modification. For the flock, we are told 
is held together, not by hedges or walls or chains, 
but simply by each one knowing the shepherd's 
voice and following him. Jesus said, "My sheep 
hear My voice and follow Me." The flock is 



THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 69 

bound together only by each one being bound to 
the shepherd by ties of trust and affection. 

Look where we may in scripture, the church of 
Jesus Christ is a living body, united to a living 
head, not by the ligaments of ecclesiasticism but 
by a common life. 

If such be the principle on which the church is 
organized, it follows that we cannot be made mem- 
bers of it by catechetical instruction, by baptism, 
by confirmation, by probation, or by any other rite 
or ceremony. We may build a magnificent temple 
for worship, we may have a ministry ordained in 
the regular succession, we may serve out our pro- 
bation and be admitted into full connection, our 
names may stand high upon the record of the 
church here, yet all this will avail us nothing if 
there be no personal union between Jesus and our 
souls. The test of membership at the last great 
day will be, not whether our names are found upon 
the record of the church, but whether they are 
found in the Lamb's Book of Life. The book 
which seals immortal destinies is not a book of 
Chronicles, nor of Acts, nor of Psalms, but of life. 
I have seen sand and steel filings all mixed to- 
gether, and have seen a magnet thrown into this 
mixture. The particles of sand were just as near 
the magnet as were those of steel; yet when the 



7° THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 

magnet was lifted the sand all remained, while the 
steel, clinging to it, was taken along. 

So I have thought, in the church on earth, living 
Christians and merely formal ones may be associ- 
ated together in the same communion, but when 
Jesus comes down into the church to gather 
together His own elect, those who are true steel 
will feel the magnetism of His nature, and will be 
drawn irresistibly to Him, while the others will 
neither know Him nor be known of Him. 

I would not undervalue the visible church nor 
any of its ordinances. It is a God-appointed insti- 
tution, and no Christian has a right voluntarily to 
remain outside its pale. The logic which forces the 
obligation of uniting with the church is simple and 
conclusive. God is no respector of persons, and if, 
therefore, any one man has a right to remain out 
of the church, all others have the same right. The 
exercise of this right would be the annihilation of 
the church. But God has ordained that His church 
should never be destroyed, and has commanded 
that we forsake not the assembling of ourselves 
together. It is the imperative duty, therefore, of 
some to be constantly organized into a visible 
church, and since there is no privileged class in 
Christ, if it is the duty of one, it is of all. If we are 
united in Christ, we are bound to unite with each 
other in order to work more efficiently for Him. 



THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 7i 

But while I insist that every man who has given 
his heart to God should also give his hand to the 
church, I want to caution every soul who has taken 
upon him the vows of the church, with all the so- 
lemnity possible, not to rest his hopes of salvation 
simply upon this church membership. The visible 
church is not a saving institution, but a working 
place. Your entrance here is no evidence that 
your work is done ; but it is rather a pledge that 
you have consecrated yourselves to the service of 
the Master. It is your solemn duty to attend all 
the means of grace, and to engage, as far as possi- 
ble, in all the enterprises of the church. But dream 
not for a moment that these alone will admit you 
into the church above. Enter the church and work 
in it with your might, but rest your hopes of heav- 
en on nothing less than conscious vital union with 
Jesus. You must be a living member of that liv- 
ing body of which Christ is the living head, in or- 
der to membership in the invisible church. 



The Parable of the Talents, 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 

For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, 
who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. After a 
long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. 

Matthew XXIV : 17 and 19. 

The application of this parable is not left to con- 
jecture. We are told at the outset that the king- 
dom of heaven is like unto it. The kingdom of 
heaven, however, is a somewhat ambiguous phrase. 
Sometimes in scripture it means the home of the 
blessed beyond, and is synonymus with the Holy 
City and the New Jerusalem. At other times it is 
employed to mean the church on earth in which 
God's regal authority is recognized, and over which 
He reigns by His revealed law and by the influ- 
ences of His Holy Spirit. In the text it is used in 
a sense widely different from either of these. It is 
here very clearly employed to point out the econo- 
my of grace or the rule of God's government over 
man in the gospel dispensation. This being the 
meaning of the phrase "kingdom of heaven" it fol- 
lows that the parable is designed to teach the prin- 
ciple upon which God distributes His favors among 
men, and the measure of responsibility which men 
are under to God. 

75 



76 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 

The man in the parable, who, having decided 
upon a journey into a far country, called his serv- 
ants together and distributed among them his 
goods to be held in trust until his return, is readily 
recognized to be the Lord Jesus Christ, who "when 
He ascended up on high gave gifts to men" and 
who also has required of His servants that they 
should occupy "till He come again." 

The first thing that attracts attention is that 
something was given to each servant without an 
exception. No one was deemed worthy to be 
intrusted with all, nor was any one so insignificant 
or so incapable as to have nothing intrusted to his 
care, but when the division was made it was found 
that each received his portion in due season. So 
God, in the infinitude of His mercy has passed by 
none. He has not chosen an elect few to be the 
special favorites of heaven. He has not passed by 
a reprobate multitude, but he has graciously given 
a "manifestation of the spirit to every man to pro- 
fit withal." 

As in grace so also in creation and providence 
have His gifts been universally bestowed. He has 
given to every man some mental or moral endow- 
ment capable of being developed and improved. 
Each has been placed where he had or might have 
had some influence for good. There is a great 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 77 

deal to cause sighs and murmurs in the world, 
much of it men have brought upon themselves, but 
even when providence has been most sparing in its 
gifts, still there is always some cause of gratitude, 
for God's sun shines alike upon the evil and the 
good, and His rains descend upon the just and the 
unjust. 

But again it is to be observed that the master 
of the servants gave to each a different amount in 
trust. To one he gave five talents, to another two 
and to another one. It needs no argument to 
prove that the gifts of God are also thus unevenly 
distributed. It is said that there are no two things 
in nature alike, no two stars in the sky, no two 
leaves in the forest, no two flowers in the valley, 
and no two grains of sand on the seashore. Cer- 
tainly there are no two men alike. There are no 
two that look alike, none that walk alike, and none 
that speak alike. Great as are their physical dif- 
ferences the diversity of mind and heart is greater 
still. Mental conditions and gifts are of all grades, 
from the babbling idiot and the raving maniac up 
to the soaring genius of a Plato and the all-com- 
prehensive grasp of a Newton. Hearts also are of 
every mold, from those that turn sick at the death 
of a fly to those that can gaze unmoved as a stone 
upon groaning, dying armies. 



73 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 

The distribution of property has been no less 
partially made. In many a palace still may be 
found the rich man clothed in purple and fine linen 
and faring sumptuously every day, and at his gate 
Lazarus, begging to be fed with the crumbs that 
fall from his table. Some are born heirs to a 
throne, others to a hovel. Some are born heirs to 
continual misfortune, and others to uninterrupted 
prosperity. I know that much of the inequality in 
life is attributable to the improvidence and folly of 
men themselves, but after making all due allow- 
ance for the differences of human origin, it still is 
tremendously true that providence does not bestow 
its favors with an even hand. While God gives 
something to everybody He does not give to all 
alike. 

We next observe in the parable the rule of dis- 
tribution. The Master did not thus deal out his 
talents through caprice or favoritism. It was not 
by chance, nor blind fate, nor arbitrary decree that 
the servants each received a different trust. It is 
said that he delivered to every man according to 
his several ability, and thus it is that God bestows 
His gifts on man. I verily believe that as a rule 
the influence, the power and the wealth of the 
world so far as they are the gifts of providence 
have been bestowed upon men according to their 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 79 

"several ability" — have been placed in the hands of 
those who are most competent to hold them. I 
say in so far as they are the gift of providence. But 
all the rich and mighty were not made so by provi- 
dence. The man who robs his neighbor of his 
goods either by theft or fraud was not made rich 
by God. The man who climbs to power and in- 
fluence by bribery and wrong owes his place not 
to providence but to the devil. These men may be 
the most incompetent and worst of mankind, for 
it requires only the lowest order of talent to cheat 
and steal. Such men will be very likely to abuse 
wealth in debauchery, and power in oppression, 
while others of far greater ability will remain the 
objects of their contempt and the victims of their 
cruelty. 

To these the rule does not apply. Having for- 
saken trust in providence and having sought for- 
tune in contempt of God's law, God leaves them "to 
work out their own damnation with all greediness." 
But the men who climb to seats of power, wealth 
and influence in a legitimate way according to the 
laws which providence has established for the gov- 
ernment of society are those, as a rule, who will 
use these talents to the best advantage. Here and 
there you may find an exceptional case, but it is 
easy to see that in general the men who can win 



8o THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 

wealth and power legitimately must be those who 
can handle them to advantage. Some cases there 
are of inheritance where desert of such a trust is 
entirely wanting, but in such cases the possession 
will soon change hands and will link itself to worth 
and ability. The hue and cry which we so often 
hear about the caprice of fortune, about the un- 
worthy rich man, and the deserving poor man, 
about the imbecile ruler, and the sagacious sub- 
ject, is only the whine of ambition or disappoint- 
ment and has a narrow foundation in truth. 

The poor and the humble no doubt are honest 
in their opinion when they think that had they 
wealth and power they would employ them to 
bless man and to glorify God. But dispositions of- 
ten change when fortune changes, and experience 
does not show that the men who promised most 
while they were poor and unknown have done any 
better than others when they became rich and 
great. 

I do not believe that an equal number of men 
could be found who would take the wealth of the 
honest rich men and employ it as well as it is now 
employed. I cannot believe that the men who 
have never been able to reach power and place in 
society would make as good rulers if suddenly ele- 
vated as those who have honestly succeeded in 
struggling up to these summits. 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. Si 

God's gifts are not scattered by chance or caprice 
but according to economical laws. He bestows 
His talents where they will be likely to bring Him 
the best return. He divides them among men 
"according to their several ability." 

Why God has given to men, not only different 
possessions, but also different abilities, I do not 
know. We cannot tell why He has created some, 
men, and others, angels, archangels, cherubim and 
seraphim. We must be satisfied to know that the 
potter hath power over his own- clay to make differ- 
ent vessels for different posts of honor. We had 
no claim upon God whatever and if therefore He 
has given us being at all we ought to be thankful. 
We have no more cause to complain that we are 
not gifted with the endowments of some other man 
than we have to complain that wewere not created 
angels or archangels. Believing "it is lawful for 
God to do with His own as He will," we ought to 
accept the situation His providence has assigned us 
with thankfulness and make the best' of it. For 
aught we know, it may appear in the light of eter- 
nity that what were regarded as limited abilities on 
earth, are really the loftiest endowments for heav- 
en. The men who are away down in the scale of 
society, may be of greater importance in the eye of 
God than those whose fame is sounded far and 
near. 



82 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 

Let it never be forgotten that Jesus, when he be- 
came a man passed by the regal palace and the no- 
ble mansion, the halls of greatness and the studios 
of learning, and took upon himself the form of a 
servant and chose a manger for his birthplace. 

But upon whatever principle God may vary the 
gifts of physical, mental and moral capacities, this 
one thing is revealed, that the talents which he in- 
trusts to each man's care are as a rule proportioned 
to his capabilities. He does not impose a burden 
greater than our strength. He does not allow us 
to be tempted above that we are able to bear, but 
He carefully weighs out each man's talents in the 
balance of his own abilities. 

Turn we now from the talents committed to our 
care, to the measure of man's responsibility to God. 
We are told in the parable that "after a long time 
the lord of those servants cometh and reckoneth 
with them." Days, weeks, months and years had 
rolled away and^ still the master did not come. Tal- 
ents had increased and multiplied, the servants had 
grown gray in the discharge of their trust and over 
the old mansion the ivy had stealthily crept and 
the moss. had quietly nestled down. The question 
had probably been asked at the evening fireside, 
"Will he ever come back?" and now and then it 
had been whispered that travelers sometimes find a 
grave far away from their home. 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. S3 

Still the old servants with tottering steps shuf- 
fled down to the exchange and bargained and 
traded with their lord's money as before. They 
had held the talents so long and in the majority of 
cases had increased them so much that they began 
to appear like their own. The probability that the 
master would not return to require an account 
grew stronger every day until at length they al- 
most ceased to think either of the return or the 
reckoning. 

One evening, after many long years, as they are 
sitting together, talking over the investments and 
speculations of the day, the heavy tramp of the 
camel is heard in the distance ; it comes nearer and 
nearer. The old servants turn their dulled ears 
and listen intently. By and by they detect the 
sound of human voices, and the tread of other 
beasts of burden. Presently as these sounds die 
away there is a heavy rap at the door. One tot- 
ters forward with a staff in his hand to answer the 
calls and throws open wide the door. A stranger 
enters and uncovers his face, when lo ! the master 
and his servants are standing face to face ! 

Recognition and salutations are scarcely over be- 
fore the servnts observe a wondrous change in their 
feelings. But an hour before, and they had fan- 
cied themselves proprietors of the accumulated tal- 



8 4 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 

ents in their possession ; now, all such notions are 
gone, and the feeling of a servant comes back and 
with it the certainty of a reckoning on the morrow. 
The morrow dawns, and each man in turn is re- 
quired to appear before his lord bringing with him 
both his talents and his accounts to answer the 
question how he has used and how much he has 
improved the trust committed to him. The first 
one came and said : "My Lord, thou deliveredst to 
my care five talents. I have traded with the same, 
have squandered nothing, and by economy and 
care have doubled the amount ; lo ! here are ten 
talents." The second one then came and said : "My 
Lord, thou deliveredst into my hands only two tal- 
ents, it was a small amount, but I have done the 
best I could with it. I have labored under many 
disadvantages in the market because of the small- 
ness of my capital, but I have tried to make up by 
labor and economy what I lacked in means, and 
behold I have doubled the amount; lo! there are 
four talents." 

The master smiled and said, "Well done, good 
and faithful servants; you have been faithful over 
a few things, lo ! I will make you ruler over many 
things." Then the third servant came with down- 
cast looks and carrying a napkin in his hand, and 
said : "My Lord thou only gavest to me one talent 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 85 

when thou gavest so many more to my fellow ser- 
vants. It was so small a sum, and so little could 
be done with it, that I did not think it worth my 
while to try. Besides, I knew thee to be a very 
severe master and expecting to be called to give a 
strict account for that one poor talent, I went and 
buried it to be certain that I should not lose it. Lo ! 
there thou hast thine own." The master frowned 
and said, 'Take the talent from him and cast the 
unprofitable servant into outer darkness. There 
shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." 

The kingdom of heaven, we are told, is like unto 
this. Men take the talents which God has given 
them and by their increase become great and rich 
and mighty, while the Judge of all the earth tarries 
in a far-off country. Years roll away and God 
does not break in upon their schemes to demand 
a reckoning. Because He does not execute judg- 
ment speedily, by and by they begin to forget that 
they are servants only, and to ignore their accoun- 
tability. We talk of our houses and lands, our 
flocks and herds, our silver and gold, our position 
and influence, our genius and learning, our power 
and place, forgetting that we ourselves have been 
bought with a price, that our possessions are only 
held in trust, and that for all these things God will 
bring us into judgment. We go on improving, 



86 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 

abusing or burying the talents which God has giv- 
en us until age weaves his silver threads into our 
hair and our bending forms are thankful for a staff 
on which to lean, and still the Master does not 
come. 

He has left us in unquestioned possession of our 
talents so long that we cannot realize that we shall 
soon be called to deliver them up. He has tarried 
so long that we little dream he is near at hand to 
demand a reckoning. But just then, when we are 
dreaming of ease, or gain, or glory, "In such an 
hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh." 
Brother servant of the living God, it will not be 
long at the longest until the heavy tramp of death 
will be heard approaching your door and mine. 
Voices from a far-off country will break upon our 
dull hearing, whispering, "Come away;" the knock 
of a cold and bony hand will be felt at our hearts, 
and in the next moment we shall find ourselves 
face to face with God. 

O, how our possessions will dwindle away when 
we find ourselves in the presence of the Master un- 
til we shall be glad to take the lowest servant's 
place! But while our humbled spirits gaze upon 
our Lord He changes to a Judge, a great white 
throne rises, which in stately pomp He mounts; 
great books containing all accounts are opened, 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 87 

the spirit world is teeming with inhabitants; the 
dead, small and great, are ranging themselves be- 
fore the throne and under the eye of the awful 
Judge. The recording angel reads in tones that 
make the mountains shake, and the dead from the 
highest to the lowest are judged out of those things 
that are written in the books according to their 
works whether they be good or whether they be 
bad. Whether our opportunities have been great 
or small, whether our talents have been many or 
few, and whether we have improved them or not, 
we must all appear before the judgment seat of 
Jesus Christ to ■ "give an account of the deeds done 
in the body." 

As in the parable so in Christ's great day of 
account, each man's responsibility will be meas- 
ured by the number of talents committed to his 
keeping. The men to whom He has committed 
five talents — those to whom He has given wealth, 
position, power, learning, vast opportunities for 
well doing, extended fields of usefulness— will 
have a fearful reckoning in that day. 

It will then be asked, How many hungry have 
you fed? How many naked have you clothed? 
How many sick have you visited and comforted? 
How many tears have you wiped away? How much 
influence did you exert for God and His Christ? 



88 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 

What kind of an example did you set to those 
who looked up to you for guidance? What did 
you do to strengthen the weak and enlighten the 
ignorant? How many erring brothers did you re- 
claim, and how many souls did you win for Jesus 
Christ? It will not do to answer, We did as much 
as some others did; I gave as much as my poor 
neighbor; I exerted as much influence and set as 
good an example as my humble and weak brother; 
I bore as much testimony and won as many souls 
for Jesus as that weak minded and ignorant disciple 
of the Master. 

Your duty is not measured by another man's 
performance but by the number of your talents and 
the opportunities you had for exercising them. 
That poor, weak, ignorant brother had but one 
talent; you had five,. and God requires of you five 
times as much as of him. Happy will it be for 
those whom God has favored most if, in the great 
day of reckoning they can render such an account 
as shall earn from the. Master the plaudit, Well 
done, good and faithful servant, thou hast been 
faithful over a few things, behold I will make thee 
ruler over many things, enter thou into the joy of 
thy Lord. 

On the other hand those that were gifted with 
but one talent will not be excused for doing noth- 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 89 

ing because of the smallness of their gifts. We 
dare not make reply that our lot was so humble and 
our abilties so small that we could do nothing for 
Christ. There is none so weak and humble but 
he can do something. It is a small thing to wipe 
away a tear, to speak a kind word, to take a trem- 
bling sinner by the hand and lead him to his Sav- 
ior. The smallest one can do this ; at least he can 
try, nor will he pass the judgment uncondemned 
without the effort. 

It will not do to answer that because we could 
not do what others did we became discouraged and 
would not do what we could. God does not ask 
of you what others did of greater ability, but sim- 
ply what you are able to do. Of him to whom lit- 
tle is given little will be required. The wren is 
not expected to sing like the lark nor the beetle to 
soar like the eagle, but the wren can chirp her 
rude song to her nest' while the lark fills all heaven 
with song, and the beetle can flutter and buzz 
while the eagle flaps the clouds beneath his broad 
wings. And thus, ye little ones in Christ, while 
you can never bring ten talents to lay at the feet 
of Jesus, you can improve your one, and this is all 
the Master asks. If you have yearned to rival oth- 
ers in some great deeds, and have failed, so much 
the more you ought to strive to do the little that is 



90 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 

required. If the prophet had bid thee do some 
great thing wouldst thou not have done it? how 
much rather than when he saith wash and be clean. 
O, there are thousands in the church to-day who 
do nothing, because they can do no great thing. 
Because they cannot give dollars, they will not 
give cents ; because they cannot lead they will not 
follow; because they cannot speak in public, they 
will not speak in private. If every member would 
but do something, however small, do just what he 
could, the church would know no want and the 
ark of the Lord would move forward. God will 
have a reckoning for thousands for burying their 
one talent. 

Some there are who seem to think that to keep 
what God has given them is all that is required. 
They never tell their experience, they never give 
of .their money, they never use their influence to 
lead others to salvation. They live for themselves 
and in themselves ; in other words, they wrap their 
talent in a napkin and bury it in the earth. They 
forget that not to increase is to diminish, not to 
give is to lose. The talent that was buried in the 
earth was not the same when the Master called for 
it. Time had had his corroding fingers upon it 
and had wasted it. The very seclusion that was 
meant to preserve it had slowly been eating it up. 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 91 

The spring that is always pouring out its waters to 
bless others, is always full and fresh and sweet, 
while the pool that hoards and never gives be- 
comes green and putrid and soon dries up. Our 
talents, be they one or five, were not given us to 
keep but to improve, and when the Master comes 
He will ask more than He gave. Woe will ■ be to 
him who then digs up his buried treasure and can 
only say 'There, Thou hast that is Thine." Aye, 
and before that final clay shall come he may be 
startled to hear an authortative voice say "Take 
the talent from him and give it unto him that hath 
ten talents." 

It will not do to throw the blame of our failures 
upon God and say with the slothful servants, "I 
knew thee that thou wert a hard man, reaping 
where thou hast not sown and gathering where 
thou hast not strown and I was afraid and went and 
hid thy talent in the earth." The very charge of se- 
verity we bring against God is our own condemna- 
tion and the Judge of all the earth will answer us 
as did the Master in the parable, "If thou knewest 
that I would be so exacting ; if you dreamed — what 
you should have known was not true — that I would 
be unreasonable in my demands, you ought for that 
very reason to have labored the more that the in 



92 THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 

crease might be greater. Out of your own mouth 
you shall be condemned." 

Such an excuse will not pass current in the day 
of final account. God will not turn and say, "Thou 
fearful and timid servant, your fears were unfound- 
ed but they shall serve to excuse in part at least 
the want of improvement in your talent." No, 
no. His piercing eye shall see through the flimsy 
veil of deceit and His answer shall apply the true 
and proper names to the real cause of talent unim- 
proved. With wrath He will answer, "Thou wick- 
ed and slothful servant; take the talent from him 
and cast him into outer darkness. There shall be 
weeping and gnashing of teeth." 

God has given unto every man some talent, and 
to each according to his ability, and from every 
soul He will require an account. Rich and poor, 
small and great, old and young, must bring their 
talents forth and pass the reckoning. There is no 
escape, there is no excuse. The talents, whether 
few or many, must be improved and the return ren- 
dered to God must be in proportion to the num- 
ber of advantages and opportunities conferred. 
Ours is a sacred trust, and in the fear of God must 
we discharge it. O, fellow-servants of the same 
great Master, let us daily strive so to use and so 
to improve the little or the much that has been in- 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 93 

trusted to our keeping, that when the books are 
opened and the reckoning is made, we may hear 
the awful Judge proclaim, "Well done, good and 
faithful servant, thou hast been faithful over a few 
things, lo ! I will make thee ruler over many things. 
Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." 



The Journey to Emmaus. 



THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 



What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another 
as ye walk, and are sad ?— Euke XXIV : 17. 



It often happens now as in the past that our 
greatest blessings come to us in disguise. The 
redemption of our race covered the world with 
gloom instead of glory at the time it was accom- 
plished. The little band of disciples who consti- 
tuted the church at that time, stood around the 
cross with hearts breaking and eyes streaming with 
tears while Jesus ransomed man from death; and 
when the work was complete and sin's last fetter 
had been dissolved in his warm blood, as He lift- 
ed his eyes in triumph and shouted "It is finished," 
instead of loud hallelujahs and deafening shouts of 
rejoicing from shore to shore, the earth shuddered 
and the church groaned. Jesus said, "I am the 
light of the world," and the world has long turned 
to Him for illumination, yet when He was lifted up 
above the world instead of flooding it with light we 
read "there was darkness over all the land." A 
man can be blinded by excess of light as well as by 
its absence, and it not unfrequently happens now as 
it did then, that God's salvation comes to us in a 

97 



98 THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 

form that blinds us and for the moment leaves us 
covered with darkness. 

Almost every discovery, either in science or art, 
at the time it is made, gives rise to more sorrow 
and apprehension than joy. Men blindly imagine 
that any change the end of which they cannot see 
must forebode evil. The introduction of a new 
machine into any of the arts is usually regarded by 
the masses as the forerunner of starvation and 
ruin. The discoveries of science very commonly 
shake the world of mind like an earthquake and 
men imagine that they are so many infernal ma- 
chines for blowing up religion. Yet art marches 
forward and science clears her eagle vision and 
peers farther into the unknown and all the while 
the race advances and faith knits her muscles in a 
firmer hold upon the cross. The fact is all truth is 
God's truth and every real discovery is simply 
bringing God nearer to man. Every new truth 
thus laid bare will necessitate a readjustment of 
human relations or a reconstruction of human be- 
liefs, but it will do this simply because it lifts man 
to a higher plain of living. The sea captain who, 
on the deck, adjusts his glass to sight a vessel on 
the distant horizon will find that glass quite out of 
focus if he ascend the mast and from its top levels 
his gaze to the horizon. As he climbs higher the 



THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 99 

field of his vision grows broader and the horizon 
recedes to a greater distance. Objects now be- 
come blurred and indistinct with the old adjust- 
ment of the lenses, and if he would see clearly now 
over the whole field of the waters he must readjust 
his glass. But this change in the instrument 
through which he looks, compelled by the new ele- 
vation which he has attained, will neither injure 
his sight nor destroy the objects which before he 
saw — it will only enable him to look farther and to 
bring the distant unseen into view. 

Every secret of nature which man can unlock is 
a treasury of wealth to our race and men will ul- 
timately be made happier and better by it, but it 
often comes as a blessing in disguise and for a while 
we do not recognize it as a friend as we walk along 
life's pathway and are sad. It takes some time to 
get our mental vision adjusted to the new situation 
and until then our sight will be blurred and we 
shall "see men as trees walking." The disciples 
thought themselves orphans when Christ died, 
while the truth was, as they afterward clearly 
learned, through that death they became the sons 
of God. It was because they failed to recognize 
the deep import of the crucifixion that their faith 
faltered and their courage gave way. They were 
„ LofC. 



ioo THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 

not alone in that experience — the whole world of 
mankind has always "walked and been sad" be- 
cause we fail to interpret God's meaning aright in 
the unfolding events around us. 

Another truth which we learn from this pas- 
sage is that the two disciples on their way to Em- 
maus failed to recognize Jesus Himself when He 
spoke to them and walked with them. Somewhere 
on the journey Jesus joined Himself with them; 
whether they overtook Him or whether He over- 
took them, or whether He entered the road which 
they were traveling from some intersecting path 
just as they were passing that point, we are not 
told. In some quiet way which did not startle 
them or excite their curiosity, He fell in with them 
and joined in the conversation by asking the ques- 
tion which constitutes the text, viz. : "What man- 
ner of communications are these that ye have one 
to another as ye walk and are sad?" But though 
they walked and talked together for a considerable 
distance, still the disciples did not even guess who 
the stranger was whose fiery words made their 
hearts burn within them." It is said in the narra- 
tive that "their eyes were holden that they should 
not know Him." But we are not to understand by 
this that they were supernaturally blinded for the 
purpose of preventing this recognition or that any 



THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 101 

change took place in their powers of vision what- 
ever. Mark gives us the secret of their not know- 
ing Christ in his gospel. He says "He appeared 
in another form to two of them as they walked and 
went into the country." It was because He came 
to them in another form from that to which they 
were accustomed that they failed to recognize Him, 
and their eyes were holden only in the sense that 
they did not pierce the disguise and discover be- 
neath the new form their old Friend and Master. 
We say to-day that a man is blind who does not 
see through flimsy disguises and recognize familiar 
objects, or that he is deaf if he does not detect a 
familiar voice, although it is changed for the pur- 
pose of deceiving him. By such expressions we 
mean simply to charge the man with stupidity for 
not detecting the disguise and discovering the real 
presence. This, I take it, is just what Luke means 
when he says their eyes were holden that they 
should not know Christ, he means to say that they 
ought to have known Him at once, notwithstand- 
ing His changed form, and that they were down- 
right stupid for not recognizing Him, and not that 
there was any real spell put upon their sight to pre- 
vent their knowing their Lord. When we remem- 
ber that it is almost certain Luke was one of the 
two disciples it will not seem strange or harsh for 



io2 THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 

him to declare their stupidity in not detecting their 
Lord. He condemns himself no less than Cleopas 
for being so blind. Now that he has recognized 
the risen Christ he cannot understand how they 
could have failed to know him as He walked and 
talked with them by the way. 

At first thought we are inclined to agree with 
Luke in condemning the two disciples. It does 
seem as though men who had known Christ so well 
before His death ought not to have been so slow 
in recognizing Him after His resurrection. Even 
if His physical appearance and dress were greatly 
changed, still when He expounded the Scriptures 
at so great length to them they ought to have de- 
tected something in His voice or in His mode of 
teaching by which to identify Him. 

Let us not be too hasty, however, lest in our 
judgment of them we condemn ourselves. The 
simple fact of their not recognizing Christ in his 
altered form had never been recorded in God word 
but that it expresses a deep spiritual truth under- 
lying all human nature. There is a spell upon all 
our souls and all our eyes are holden so that we 
do not know Jesus when He comes to us in anoth- 
er form. He is walking with us along life's dusty 
road and talking with us every day until our hearts 
burn within us, and we do not think that we have 



THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. foj 

been in company with God because He did not 
assume the form that we expected. No form is 
natural to God — He is a Spirit without body or 
parts — and when He assumes any form it is only 
for the purpose of coming into communication 
with us. He can assume one form as well as an- 
other, and we ought not therefore to look for the 
Divine Presence to manifest itself always in the 
same way. Sometimes He indicates His presence 
by "a still, small voice," at another time He comes 
as "a rushing, mighty wind." Now He moves as 
a pillar of cloud and of fire before Israel and anon 
His presence is manifested by "the sound of a go- 
ing in the tops of the mulberry trees," but wher- 
ever His disciples journey in some form He walks 
with them. Jesus said "Lo ! I am with you always, 
even unto the end of the world." We are such 
children of sense that when we have become fa- 
miliar with one form of Divine influence and teach- 
ing we overlook the Savior's presence and fail to 
recognize His voice when He comes in another 
form. 

Men of science can detect God's footprints in the 
rocks and can read His law written in matter it- 
self all over the material universe; but when they 
come to this old sacred book their eyes are holden 
that they do not know its author; when God in- 



*o4 THE JOURNEY TO EMMAU& 

spires men and speaks through human lips they 
do not recognize His voice. They claim that He 
has revealed His will and ways in the record of 
the rocks, but when Moses comes down the moun- 
tain with the tables of stone containing the law, the 
form of the revelation is so different from what 
they are accustomed to that they do not recognize 
its Divinity. And, on the other hand, the man 
who has learned to commune with Christ through 
His holy word and through the influence of the 
Holy Spirit, who has been accustomed to meet 
Him in the seclusion of the closet or at the altars 
of the Church, can scarcely realize that it is the 
same Jesus who walks with him along the high- 
way of life making his heart burn within him while 
engaged in the secular affairs of life. If the form 
of the Master's presence be altered, He will talk 
to Him and not know Him. We are so stupidly 
narrow minded that we imagine Christ can come 
to us only in one form and speak to us only in one 
way. In one of Raphael's paintings the whole 
back ground is made up of a cloud of angel faces, 
and so, were our eyes not holden, go where we 
might, look where we would, we would see Jesus 
everywhere. Now, as on the road to Emmaus, He 
is speaking to us as we walk and are sad, but how 
slow we are to recognize the voice. He speaks as 



THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 105 

clearly and as loudly to us through His providence 
as through His word or Spirit, but very often we 
do not know Him when He comes in this form. 
When He comes as an angel of light and breathes 
health and peace and prosperity into our homes 
we readily recognize Him as our Lord and bow 
down in thanksgiving before Him. But when He 
comes in "another form" and there is a crash in 
our business, or our health gives way or our plans 
and purposes are thwarted, or our loved ones are 
snatched from us and we move with muffled foot- 
steps through the house and start to hear our own 
breathing, how slow we are to believe that it is Je- 
sus, as we walk and are sad. 

I am not speaking of the miseries which men 
bring upon themselves by the violation of God's 
law but of those which come upon us by the order- 
ing of a providence which no human foresight and 
effort can avert. Sorrow is a part of God's gov- 
ernment of a fallen world. It has as large a mis- 
sion as joy in removing the curse of the fall and re- 
storing the image of God in man. It takes night 
as well as day ; storm as well as sunshine, to ripen 
the harvest for the garner ; and so it takes tears in- 
terwoven with smiles, sorrow commingled with joy 
to prepare the soul for its home in heaven. The 
Captain of our salvation was made perfect through 



io6 THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 

suffering, and we who make up the rank and file of 
His army will have to tread in His footsteps. There 
is a ripening, a mellowing and a sweetening influ- 
ence which comes from sorrow and which comes 
from nowhere else that moulds the soul into the 
Christlike. God does not willingly afflict us — 
"whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth and scourg- 
eth every son whom He receiveth" — if He comes 
to us mantled in darkness it is because He sees that 
our souls need the shadow to bleach them white. 
If He comes to talk to us while we walk and are 
sad it is because in that mood His words will sink 
down deeper and make more lasting impressions 
in our souls. But times of sorrow, sadness and 
tears will come to us all sooner or later in life, and 
Jesus comes with them to soften and sanctify them 
to our spiritual good. He never comes nearer and 
never speaks more sweetly than when we walk in 
tears and are sad; but tears often blind us to His 
presence and our moaning and cries drown the 
tender tones of His voice. May God help us to 
recognize the Master in whatever form He conies 
and to know Him in our sorrow no less than in our 
joy. 

Another truth revealed by this passage is that 
Jesus appears while we are thinking and talking 
about Him. It was while Luke and Cleopas were 



THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 107 

talking about the crucifixion, the burial and the 
promised resurrection that Christ joined them and 
asked "What communications are these that ye 
have one to another." Nor was this an exception- 
al case. When Christ was made known to them 
in the breaking of bread at Emmaus, it is said that 
they rose up the same hour and returned to 
Jerusalem. Upon their arrival where the eleven 
were gathered together, the first sound which 
greeted their ears was "The Lord is risen indeed 
and hath appeared unto Simon." In confirmation 
of the joyful tidings in possession of the eleven, 
they then related "what things were done in the 
way and how He was known of them in breaking 
of bread." "And as they thus spake Jesus Himself 
stood in the midst of them and saith unto them, 
Peace be unto you." When Mary Magdalene 
came to the sepulchre on the morning of the third 
day and found the body of Jesus gone, she burst 
into tears. The angel sentinels, touched by her 
grief, inquired, "Woman, why weepest thou?" 
Mary answered, "Because they have taken away 
my Lord and I know not where they have laid 
Him." While these words yet lingered on her 
lips she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but 
like Luke and Cleopas she did not know Him. 
Jesus asked, "Woman, why weepest thou? Whom 



io8 THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 

seekest thou?" Mary, mistaking Him for the 
gardener, replied, "Sir, if thou have borne Him 
hence, tell me where thou hast laid Him and I will 
take Him away." Then Jesus said in a voice so 
tenderly familiar and sweet that she could not mis- 
take it, "Mary!" It was enough, and she whis- 
pered in rapturous devotion, "Rabboni !" It was 
while she was talking about Jesus and thinking of 
nothing else that the Master appeared and spoke 
to her. 

These numerous appearances of Christ while His 
disciples are conversing about Him indicate a law 
governing the communion of Christ with His peo- 
ple. He does not always appear when we walk 
and are sad like Luke and Cleopas. He does not 
always meet us when we weep and are sad like 
Mary Magdalene. He does not always reveal 
Himself in our midst when we are met together 
and are sad, like the eleven, but He does always 
come when our thoughts are fixed upon Him and 
our conversation is about Him. The kind of com- 
munion we have one with another has more to do 
with our spiritual communions than we commonly 
suppose. There is a deep philosophy in the old 
saw "Talk about angels and you will hear the rust- 
ling of their wings." Conversation coins and ex- 
changes thought and by means of it we get our 



f HE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 109 

scattered thinking into definite shape and into sym- 
pathy with those around us. If we talk about 
Christ, by the very exercise, we shall get clearer 
views of His character and realize more the need 
of His coming. Religious conversation thus lifts 
us up upon a higher plain of thought and feeling 
and before we know it we are in the immediate 
presence of Christ; for the intense thought of 
Christ together with an ardent love for Him is nev- 
er farther from His real presence than the shadow 
is from the substance. This thinking and talking 
about Christ may bring Him no nearer to us than 
He was before, but it will open our eyes to the fact 
of a strange presence by our side, and it will unstop 
our ears that we shall hear whisperings of heav- 
enly sweetness, and it will so warm our hearts that 
they shall burn within us with a new, strange joy. 

I think the men of former times had greater 
manifestations of the Savior's presence than is 
granted to the church to-day because meditation 
and conversation upon holy things were more 
common then than now. We have more zeal, 
more energy, more enthusiasm to-day in the church 
than ever since apostolic times, but we have far less 
near and clear intercourse between our souls and 
Christ. Our religion is characterized by intense 
activity in running the machinery of the church, 



no THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 

and our conversation is all about means and ends, 
but holy meditation and "the communion of 
saints" are almost entirely ignored. Is it any won- 
der, while we are talking about stocks and profits 
and interest and thinking about politics and busi- 
ness and pleasure that Jesus does not manifest 
Himself to us in soul enrapturing visions? If we 
will but drive out the money changers and world- 
lings from the temple of our thoughts Jesus will 
quickly enter; and if we will but cleanse our lips 
and speak of Jesus and His salvation to others, 
while yet His name is on our tongue His foot- 
falls will be heard at our side, and He will whisper 
in our deepest soul, "Peace be unto you." "Wher- 
ever two or three are met together in my name, 
there am I in the midst of them," said the Master. 
No matter where the meeting may be held, wheth- 
er beneath frescoed domes in marble halls, or out 
along the road to Emmaus with nothing but the 
blue arch of Heaven overhead — wherever two or 
three are met in Christ's name, i. e., as Christians 
for the purpose of Christian communion, there 
Jesus draws the veil aside and reveals Himself as 
the fairest among ten thousand and the one alto- 
gether lovely. Are there those here who are 
mourning an absent Christ and who with bowed 
down heads are asking, "Saw ye Him whom my 



THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. Hi 

soul loveth?" O, brother, go talk about Him to 
somebody else, and while you recommend Him and 
His salvation to another He will appear to you 
until your heart will burn within you. 

The manner of Christ's appearing to His people 
is also indicated in the text and context. The nar- 
rative indicates that as the two disciples walked 
along the road talking over the sad story of the 
crucifixion and endeavoring to strengthen each 
other's faith in the resurrection, by and by they 
became conscious of the presence of a third per- 
son. They had been so absorbed in thoughts of 
Christ and in conversation respecting Him that 
they did not notice when the stranger joined them 
nor whence he came. The account reads, "while 
they communed together and reasoned, Jesus Him- 
self drew near and went with them." He came so 
gently and unobtrusively that before they knew it 
they were walking and talking with Him as an 
accepted companion. 

The same thing was true in the case of Mary 
Magdalene. Christ's appearance to her was so 
natural and unobtrusive that she was not startled in 
the least. When He came or where He came 
from she did not know nor did she stop to inquire. 
She had not seen Him when she came and when 
she turned away from the angel, lo ! He stood be- 



ii2 THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 

fore her, and yet His appearance was so easy that 
her curiosity was not excited to even inquire who 
He was. The case of the eleven disciples to which 
reference has already been made is another in 
point. They were assembled together and were 
rehearsing the strange stories of Christ's resurrec- 
tion which had just been set afloat; "and as they 
thus spake Jesus Himself stood in the midst of 
them." No man heard His footfalls, no man saw 
His approach, yet no man seemed startled by His 
presence. He did not come there; He simply ap- 
peared there and was there without coming. And 
His presence was so quiet and natural that no man 
seemed shocked by the discovery. 

Appearances like these suggest two questions: 
First, Where did He come from? and, second, How 
did He get there? He had not yet, He tells us, 
ascended to His Father and our Father, to His 
God and our God. He is still upon the earth, yet 
by far the greater part of the time between the 
resurrection and the ascension, He was invisible to 
mortal sight. We can locate Him when we see 
Him, but where is He when we cannot see Him? 
Physical objects diminish in distinctness as they are 
removed farther from us, and so when Christ van- 
ishes out of sight we think of Him as going away 
into the distance, and when He appears to His dis- 



THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 113 

ciples we think of Him as coming back again. But 
all physical laws fail when applied to a resurrected 
Christ. A closed door keeps a human body out of 
a room, but Jesus appeared in the midst of the dis- 
ciples, the door being shut. Gravitation holds the 
human form firmly down to earth, but while Jesus 
talked with His disciples on Olivet He was parted 
from them and was taken up into Heaven. And 
so, contrary to common experience, Jesus appeared 
without coming and vanished without going. He 
emerged out of the unseen and melted back into it 
again at pleasure. There was no distance to be 
crossed in order to bring Christ into the presence 
of the disciples. He was there all the while. The 
unseen, the spiritual, is all around us. It laves us 
on every side and enfolds us like the atmosphere. 
Jesus fills the unseen. In Him we live and move 
and have our being. We need not ascend into 
Heaven to bring Christ down nor descend into the 
deep to bring Him up. He is all around us; nor 
can we escape His presence. His own words are 
expressive no less of a great spiritual truth than of 
a consoling promise — "Lo ! I am with you alway, 
even unto the end of the world." He is here al- 
ready whether we see Him or not and does not 
need to come in order to manifest Himself. 

But if He be thus always at our side, why do we 



U4 THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 

not always realize His presence? How does He 
catch the attention of His people and manifest 
Himself to them at one time and not at another? 
There is mystery here which we cannot fathom. 
The how and why we do not know. The soul 
needs a very delicate adjustment to perceive the 
Master's presence. There is an intimate relation 
between our internal state and Christ's appearance 
to us which we do not fully understand. We only 
know that He is present all the time and that now 
and then that presence manifests itself to our con- 
sciousness and presses itself upon our thought with 
tenfold its usual intensity. There is music always 
in the air and everywhere. It is all around us when 
we wake and when we sleep. An organ does not 
make music — it only wakes it from its sleep as it 
floats on the wind. It brings it out of the world 
of silence and makes it audible to the human ear. 
But even the organ will not reveal the presence 
of music unless human fingers strike its keys aright. 
There must be a certain adjustment of the player 
and the organ to the surrounding air with its latent 
harmonies or the music will never emerge from the 
land of silence. Jesus dwells in the realm of the 
unseen all about us and our souls are the organs 
through which He manifests His presence, but it 
is only as God's Spirit now and then strikes the full 



THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 115 

chords on these harps of a thousand strings that 
we become conscious of ■ His presence and hear 
Him whisper, "Peace be unto you." 

I think in almost every case the penitent soul 
seeking Jesus expects Him to descend from Heav- 
en in blessing. He thinks of Jesus as removed 
from Him and is looking out of Himself to catch 
a glimpse of His absent Lord. But when at last 
He sees Jesus as his Savior, the Master's appear- 
ance is just as it was on the road to Emmaus or in 
the assembly of the eleven on the day of His resur- 
rection. All at once, without coming, mysterious- 
ly He is there, and the first feeling is very com- 
monly one of surprise that we did not recognize 
His presence before. How He got there or when 
He came we do not know. "The wind bloweth 
where it listeth and thou nearest the sound thereof 
but canst not tell whence it came nor whither it 
goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit." 
Ah, the secret truth is, God's Spirit just then struck 
the chord within our souls which sounded "Thy 
sins be forgiven thee," and quicker than thought 
all the music of Heaven was ringing in our ears. 
Our souls that instant became adjusted to the spir- 
itual and unseen, and Jesus' beauteous face 
emerged from the invisible and beamed in tender- 
8 



u6 THE JOURNEY TO EMMAUS. 

ness upon us. As it was then at the beginning of 
the journey, so it will be all along the road. While 
we commune with one another and reason about 
the great salvation, our spirit vision will become 
sensitive to the unseen and ever and anon Jesus will 
appear at our side and the warmth of His presence 
will make "our hearts burn within us." 



Patience Confiding in God, 



PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 



Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the I*ord. 

— Exodus XIV : 13. 



These words were spoken by Moses to the chil- 
dren of Israel as they stood on the shore of the Red 
Sea. In obedience to his command they had fled 
from Egypt. He had promised that if they would 
break away from their bondage and flee from their 
old masters he would lead them to a land of free- 
dom. Eagerly they had embraced the promise 
and shook off their fetters. Egypt was soon out 
of sight and their taskmasters were left far behind. 
Trusting in their fleetness of foot they already 
exulted in their newly acquired liberty and little 
dreamed that they would be overtaken by their 
old masters. They were pressing eagerly forward 
expecting soon to reach the land of corn and wine, 
where they would revel in abundance and forget 
their former bondage. 

But as they press forward they at length discover 
in the distance the Red Sea lying directly across 
their path and forbidding their further progress. 
Before this obstruction they come to a dead halt, 
when lo ! a messenger arrives bringing intelligence 

119 



iso PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 

that the Egyptian army is in hot pursuit and not 
far in their rear. In a moment Israel, disheartened 
and dismayed, imagine all their efforts, after free- 
dom to have been in vain and are ready to give up 
the struggle in despair and go back to their bond- 
age. It was then that Moses spake these words 
of assurance. He had a deeper insight into Di- 
vine things than the Israelites and knew better 
what God's salvation meant. It is said that God 
"made known His ways unto Moses, his acts unto 
the children of Israel. They only saw what God 
did; Moses was taken behind the curtain and saw 
why He did it. Israel, though escaped from Egypt, 
carried much of their bondage along with them. 
They imagined themselves free, while they were 
slaves to impatience and fear and knew little of 
the liberty of God's dear children. They talked 
loudly about the salvation of God, while they were 
trusting only in their own efforts for escape and 
had no faith whatever in God's providence be- 
yond what they could see. They could fight or 
work or fly, but to stand still and wait and calmly 
trust was a deep lesson in spiritual emancipation 
which they needed yet to learn. Moses let them 
exhaust their strength and led them to where they 
could go no further, where human effort was ut- 
terly without avail ; and then said to them in sub- 



PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 121 

stance, you have done all that you can and your 
salvation is not yet complete, but don't be discour- 
aged. "It is not by might nor by power, but by 
my Spirit, saith the Lord." This deliverance is not 
of your procuring. It is God who undertakes to 
accomplish it. Having done all you could, now 
rise to a calm and settled confidence that God will 
surely bring it to pass. "Fear ye not; stand still 
and see the salvation of the Lord." 

The Israelites are not alone in the experience 
here described. Perhaps every Christian to a 
greater or less extent has at times found himself in 
their situation and we, therefore, no less than they, 
need to take to heart the doctrine of this text. 

It is not easy to describe in words the state of 
mind and heart portrayed in this passage. No 
single word in our language will express all that is 
intended to be conveyed. The Israelites were to 
be patient, they must wait. They were to be pas- 
sive, they must stand still. They were to be con- 
fident, they must not fear the result. And finally 
they were to trust in God, they must look to see 
the salvation of the Lord. I know not how to de- 
fine this state of soul better than by calling it 
Patience confiding in God. 

A proper understanding of the salvation of Jesus 
Christ will convince us of the necessity of this com- 



122 PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 

plex Christian grace all along the journey of life. 
Moses was not commissioned simply to get the 
Israelites out of Egypt and into the promised land. 
If that had been his only mission he might have 
taken a short cut across the desert and accom- 
plished his work in a few weeks or months at long- 
est. The great work to be done which took forty 
years was the disciplining and developing of char- 
acter which would fit them for the promised land. 
So also the great work which Christ came to ac- 
complish was not simply to forgive our past trans- 
gressions and at last to receive us into Heaven. 
He came not to save men in their sins, but from 
their sins. The great object of Christianity is to 
restamp the Divine image upon human souls. 
Christian living means "growing up into Christ our 
living head in all things." It means the develop- 
ment of character after a certain well defined 
model. We are all building character of some sort. 
But the Christian seeks to form a character not 
after the model of Confucius, or Buddha, or Maho- 
met, but to copy the character of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. 

Such a character is not simple, but complex. 
It consists not of a single virtue, but embraces all 
the virtues and all the graces. A man's salvation 
is far from complete when he has exercised faith 



PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 123 

only. Faith breaks the fetters of his bondage and 
sets him free, but there is a long march before him 
and many phases of experience before he reaches 
the land of promise. He must now "add to his 
faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowl- 
edge temperance, and to temperance patience, and 
to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly 
kindness and to brotherly kindness charity." It 
takes not one or a few of these, but all, to form a 
Christlike character. 

Moreover the Christian character requires not 
only that we possess all these virtues in kind, but 
that we have them in a high degree. A man who 
has only a little faith and a little peace and a little 
temperance and a little patience does not realize 
the ideal Christian. Peter after enumerating the 
catalogue of Christian graces just given, continues : 
"For if these things be in you and abound, they 
make you that ye shall be neither barren nor un- 
fruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." 
Everywhere we are exhorted not to be satisfied 
with stinted measure but to seek it pressed down, 
shaken together and running over. Are we fruit- 
bearing branches? Jesus says "Herein is my Fath- 
er glorified, that ye bear much fruit, so shall ye be 
my disciples." Are we seed-sowers? God says 
"Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters." Are 



i2 4 PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 

we sent forth to convert the world? "They that turn 
many to righteousness shall shine as the stars for- 
ever and ever." Are we to be beneficent. Jesus 
says "Give to him that asketh thee and from him 
that would borrow of thee turn not thou away." 
The inner life must correspond with the outer and 
must abound in its graces as the external life does 
in its works. We are not to be satisfied with a lit- 
tle faith. Our constant prayer must be, O, Lord, 
increase our faith." We are not to rest in a feeble 
hope. Our hope is to be "like an anchor to the 
soul, both sure and steadfast." It is not enough 
to have cold charity. God says "have fervent char- 
ity among yourselves." We are not to look for a 
little peace. But "the peace of God which passeth 
all understanding shall keep your heart and mind 
through Christ Jesus." The Christian standard of 
righteousness is no narrow one. God exclaims 
"O that thou hadst hearkened to my command- 
ments, then had thy peace been as a river and thy 
righteousness as the waves of the sea." 

We are to be new creatures in Christ Jesus, but 
we are not to remain simply babes. We are to 
grow up and become men and women in Christ. 
We are to be made alive from the dead, but ours 
is not to be a sickly, feeble life. Jesus came into 
the world that we might have life and that we 



PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 125 

might have it more abundantly. God's ideal of 
Christian character is not a vineyard with here and 
there a single grape, however perfect, nor with 
some stunted little clusters, few and far between. 
He looks for the fruits of the Spirit in all their 
variety, mature and abundant, to hang in great 
purple bunches like the grapes of Eschol. 

The virtues which make up a Christian life must 
not only be many and abundant but they must be 
graceful and beautiful. There is some good fruit 
that is rusty coated, but it is very uninviting. The 
velvet coat and blushing cheek add very much to 
the attractiveness of the peach and the apple. So 
the fruits of the Spirit are not simply rugged, aus- 
tere moral virtues — they are virtues covered with 
down, tinted with the maiden's blush or mellowed 
into purple. A Christian life is not only a correct 
one, but it is also a winsome and attractive one. 
There is something so delicate and graceful in it 
that it transforms moral virtues into Christian 
graces. There is sometimes as much in the man- 
ner of doing good as in the act itself. Not holi- 
ness alone, but the beauty of holiness is the ulti- 
mate goal of the Christian race. See how partic- 
ular the sacred writers are to insist that our lives 
present no naked virtues, but that they all be 
clothed with a delicate and appropriate drapery. 



126 PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 

"He that showeth mercy," let him do it "with 
cheerfulness," not reluctantly or gloomily, but ra- 
diantly and cheerily. Some men show mercy in 
such a harsh, brutal way that you feel it would 
have been a mercy if they had not shown it at all. 
As Christ's witnesses we are to testify for him. 
But oh, there is a world of difference in the way in 
which this can be done. Some people give their 
testimony so pompously and with an air of so much 
self-importance that they do their Master's cause 
more harm than good. Peter tells us how to do it. 
He says, "Be ready always to give an answer to 
every man that asketh you a reason of the hope 
that is in you, with meekness and fear." 

We are commanded not simply to serve the Lord 
but to "serve the Lord with gladness." We are 
not to go about it as if it were drudgery and as if 
we would like to get out of it if we could. We are 
to bring ourselves into such harmony with the Di- 
vine purposes that it becomes our meat and drink 
to do our Master's will. The true Christian serves 
Christ as if it were a privilege and not a duty. We 
are not simply to speak the truth, but to "speak 
the truth with love." We may speak the truth in 
anger, in bitterness, in intolerance, in malice. 
Naked truth may be a dagger to stab a man to the 
heart. The Christian sheathes it in a scabbard of 



PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 127 

love and presents it hilt foremost. Alms-giving is 
one thing and giving alms after the Christian model 
is a very different thing. There are many men 
who give and give liberally to charitable purposes, 
but who do it in so ungracious a way that their 
gifts lose half their value. They have the virtue 
of giving but have never learned the Christian 
grace of giving. I have known many graceful giv- 
ers, but I only remember one man who always 
thanked me for asking him when he handed in his 
contribution. Here is the Christian model, "Every 
man according as he purposeth in his heart so let 
him give, not grudgingly or of necessity for God 
loveth a cheerful giver." The ideal Christian 
character as portrayed in the New Testament is not 
simply a garden rilled with fruits of every variety 
and in rich abundance, but it is one in which these 
variegated fruits are half concealed and peep out 
and glint from beneath a drapery of flowers and 
leaves. 

"The salvation of the Lord" takes in the un- 
folding of all this complex and ornate character, 
nor will it be complete until we stand "perfect and 
entire wanting nothing." Now, if our salvation 
mean the development and adornment of all spir- 
itual capacity, if it mean the building up of fault- 
less characters and the living of lives that are full 



128 PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 

of sunshine and song, it is easy to see that we shall 
have not only to march and fight, but that we shall 
also have to stop sometimes and "stand still to see 
the salvation of the Lord" Patience calmly con- 
fiding in God we shall need at every stage of 
our progress. We shall need it, First, because 
character building is a spiritual, work and on 
that account we cannot know the precise 
progress we are making. A ship-builder, who 
was also a Sunday school superintendent, once 
said to me that he became discouraged in his 
Sunday school work because he could not see what 
he was doing. Said he, "when I start to build a 
vessel I can calculate just when she will be ready 
to launch : I can see her grow day by day under 
my hand and know exactly what progress I am 
making towards the final result; each nail I drive 
and each bolt I fasten is just that much towards 
her completion ; but my labor in the Sunday school 
is all working in the dark. I cannot see the im- 
pression that I make and cannot know that there is 
any progress. What the final outcome will be I 
cannot tell nor when the work will be completed." 
"Well," I replied, "you build a ship but you don't 
build character, though we often use that word to 
describe our efforts in that direction. Character 
is a thing of growth and we cannot make anything 



PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 129 

grow; we can only remove obstructions and pro- 
vide favorable conditions, but the force which de- 
termines the growth of an oak is in the acorn and 
that which determines the growth of character is 
in the soul. When you have done all that you 
can, you must then stand still and patiently wait 
and calmly trust in God for the final result. Even 
physical growth, while we cannot produce it, we 
can see and measure, but not the growth of the 
spirit. I can measure my growth from childhood 
to manhood in feet and inches and can weigh it in 
avoirdupois, but we have no weights and measures 
for the soul. We cannot count the fruits of the 
spirit, nor see them swell in their growth, nor be- 
hold them change into the purple and gold of ma- 
turity. Secretly and silently the work goes on out 
of sight and we can never know, therefore, precise- 
ly how rapidly we are unfolding into the Divine 
likeness. We need great patience to calmly wait 
and steadfastly trust that "He which hath begun a 
good work in us will perform it until the day of 
Jesus Christ." 

If we regard the infinite complexity of the work 
to be done in us we shall see that great patience 
and long waiting are needed to bring it to perfec- 
tion. A mushroom will grow in a single night. A 
reed will shoot up to a towering height in a single 



130 PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 

season. But these are simple structures that need 
to grow only in a few directions. When you un- 
dertake to grow an oak, an elm or a sycamore, with 
their deep reaching roots and wide spreading 
branches and infinitely complex structures, a cen- 
tury is scarce long enough. It takes sunshine and 
clouds, winter and summer, whirlwind and calm to 
knit the woody fibre into the gnarled and knotted 
muscles of the oak. But a man is vastly more 
complex than a tree, and the development of the 
highest style of man will, therefore, be a slow and 
tedious process. He must grow physically, men- 
tally and morally at the same time and these 
growths must synchronize and keep pace with each 
other for the perfection of the one will largely de- 
pend upon the progress of the others. Like his 
Master, he must grow in wisdom and in stature and 
in favor both with God and man. 

The infinite and endless variety of the soul's fac- 
ulties require that in order to a symmetrical devel- 
opment,there shall be no spasmodic growth, no hot 
house forcing of one grace at the expense of an- 
other, but that slowly and steadily through endless- 
ly varying conditions and experiences the soul 
should unfold and expand uniformly in all its parts. 
In a carpet loom with a simple pattern few shut- 
tles are required, and they may fly never so swiftly 



PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 131 

and the web grow apace. But in a Goeblin ta- 
pestry where many colors and shades are required, 
and where the figures are endlessly varied, the 
work goes on with marvelous slowness and many 
years are sometimes consumed in finishing a single 
pattern. If the work of grace within us was to 
copy any human character, we should not have to 
wait long for its completion, but the likeness of 
Christ is not woven in a human soul in a day. 
We shall need patience to stand still and wait to 
see the salvation of the Lord. 

Again, salvation is a slow work because it is to 
last forever. A great painter was once asked why 
he spent so much time upon his pictures, and his 
reply was because I am painting for eternity. If 
we were building a temporary structure that was 
designed to stand only for a few years and then be 
pulled down, we should not need to be very careful 
how it was put together. We might use the cheap- 
est material and employ the most indifferent work- 
men ; we might hurry and slight the work as much 
as we liked. A little paint and paper would cover 
all defects and the building would answer our pur- 
pose as long as we wanted it. A log cabin or a 
frame building is quickly put up ; but the Cathedral 
at Cologne was begun in 1248 and never finished 

9 



132 PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 

until 1880. St. Peters at Rome, was more than a 
hundred years in building. The foundation of the 
Cathedral at Milan was laid in 1386 and it is not 
finished yet. These buildings were put up to last; 
they were designed to be not temporary but per- 
manent. Time must be given for their founda- 
tions to settle ; each stone must be tested before it 
is put in its place and the cement must be allowed 
to harden before you disturb it with a jar. There 
is no veneering here or surface work of any kind : 
everything is solid and genuine. Even the pic- 
tures which adorn the walls of St. Peter's are not 
paintings but mosaics let into the solid marble. 
Paintings were not considered durable enough for 
this structure which was designed to stand for 
many ages. A building that goes up quickly will 
quickly come down. If we want a temple to stand 
we must be in no hurry in rearing it. We must 
patiently wait while through many years it slowly 
rises before us. Well, we are building for eternity. 
The temple of the soul is the dwelling place of God 
and is to last while God lives. These marvelous 
structures of character are to outlive time, they are 
to survive the shock of death; they are not to 
crumble even with the roll of eternity. Such 
structures are not formed in a day. The soul 
needs time for seasoning and settling. The im- 



PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 133 

pressions made upon it must not be mere surface 
pictures, but mosaics of Divine things let in to its 
very substance a gem at a time until it is all radiant 
with images of God and heavenly things. Don't 
wonder if the work goes on slowly, and don't be 
discouraged because it takes so long. "Fear ye 
not; stand still and see the salvation of the Lord." 
Let patience have her perfect work and remember 
that it requires patience for all perfect work. 

O, how much we need patience confiding in God. 
How often we become discouraged and grow tired 
in the work of grace. We have been praying and 
struggling for twenty years and more and oh, how 
far we come short of what we meant to become in 
that time when we started. We thought that in a 
score of years the seed of the kingdom would have 
so uprooted the tares of evil that all our souls 
would be golden with the harvest of holiness. But 
ever and anon today we find the thistles which have 
been cut down sprouting and springing up from 
the root. How long we have been battling with 
pride and still we are conscious that it is not all yet 
subdued. Self will, how hard we have tried to 
evercome it, but every now and then it will rise up 
and assert itself. Anger we thought we had buried 
forever, but only a few days ago it had a sudden 
resurrection. Unbelief we thought we had con- 



134 PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 

quered when lo, a whole troop of doubts and fears 
rush into our souls and take it by storm. We are 
not hypocrites — we don't mean to be and yet we 
are not half as sincere as we ought to be. We 
want to be heavenly minded and we have been 
righting through all these years to cast out the 
world, the flesh and the devil, but we have only 
half succeeded and realize that our hearts are not 
fit temples for the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. 

Disheartened with the result, we grow weary 
and tired of fighting in what seems to be a hope- 
less conflict and are ready almost to give up in de- 
spair. We say we have tried and tried our best 
and that we have tried for a long time and that it 
is no use trying we can't become the Christian 
men and women that we desire to be and can't lead 
the lives that we want to lead. Patience, brother, 
struggle on and wait. The Red Sea of difficulty 
shall yet open before you and you shall march for- 
ward dry shod. Your very growth in grace has 
been the cause of your discouragement. Because 
the eagle eye of the soul has cleared its vision, your 
perceptions of evil are keener and you see the de- 
fects in your character as never before. 

Suppose a mountain peak, tired of its rocky bar- 
ren surface, should ask God to lift it up to the line 
of perpetual frost and cover it with a dress of snow. 



PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 13S 

In answer to that prayer God begins to lift the 
whole mountain range and the peak feels the up- 
ward motion. At once it imagines its exaltation 
to be almost complete and dreams that its naked- 
ness will soon be covered and it will become a thing 
of beauty. But a century rolls away and it has on- 
ly been elevated a few feet, but each winter the 
snow fall is deeper upon it and remains longer. 
Thousands of years will roll away before it touches 
the eternal frost line and when it does it is not cov- 
ered in a single year with snow. The first winter 
comes and goes and only its gorges and caves are 
filled with snow. Its rocky sides are just as angu- 
lar and jagged as before. Next winter its valleys 
and ravines are filled, but its jutting crags are 
uglier than ever just by reason of the contrast. But 
years roll on and at last it is all covered, but when 
the summer comes, one by one the old rocks come 
peeping through the snow and show themselves 
again. There is no less snow than before. It has 
only settled down and become more compact. I 
can easily imagine that peak to become discour- 
aged and can almost hear it say, "What is the use 
of trying? I have been struggling through all 
these centuries to get a robe of spotless white. I 
thought I had reached the goal at last. But alas ! 
my fond dream is dissipated and my ugliness ap- 



136 PATIENCE CONFIDING IN GOD. 

pears again." Patience, you murmurer, you are be- 
ing lifted higher every year and by and by you will 
see your last hard rock disappear forever while clad 
in everlasting white you will lift your snowy dome 
against the sky so pure that men shall scarcely 
know whether you belong to earth or Heaven. 
O, brethren, our salvation is not yet complete, but 
it is in progress. The old nature is not yet buried, 
but a good part of it is out of sight. Be patient 
and calmly lean on God. He is lifting us into a 
clearer atmosphere every day. One by one the 
scars and stains of evil will disappear and at last we 
shall stand before the Lord without spot or wrinkle 
or any such thing, clad in garments whiter than 
snow. 



No Scripture of Private 
Interpretation. 



NO SCRIPTURE OF PRIVATE INTERPRE- 
TATION. 



We have also a more sure word of prophecy ; whereunto ye do well 
that ye take heed as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day 
dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts. Knowing this first, that no 
prophecy of the seripture is of any private interpretation.— II Peter I : 19-20. 



Two difficulties greatly perplex many good men 
who are sincerely seeking to know the mind of 
God. The first is the meagreness of the revelation 
which God has seen fit to make to us, and the other 
is the conflict between the declarations of revela- 
tion and human experience. 

The question will arise in multitudes of inquir- 
ing minds, "If the Bible be a revelation from God, 
why does it not unfold more of the Divine will and 
character to us, and why does it not make duty and 
privilege plainer?" Does God mean to mock us 
with a great volume of revelation which reveals so 
very little to us? Notwithstanding the light 
thrown by revelation upon the hereafter, the great 
problems of the future which have perplexed all 
ages are not solved by it. A thousand questions 
which the soul will propound find no answer in the 
Bible. 

And then again when we open the book and 

139 



Ho NO SCRIPTURE OF 

read its thrilling prophecies and lofty promises and 
then turn to the condition of men around us and 
behold how little of all the Bible leads us to expect 
has really been fulfilled in human experience, faith 
staggers beneath its burden of disappointment and 
either refuses to believe in the declarations of 
Scripture or else takes refuge in some mystical in- 
terpretation of the promises which robs them of all 
import and meaning. There are hundreds of 
thousands of Christian men, to say nothing of the 
un-Christian world, who have been troubled with 
doubts and driven to forced and unreasonable in- 
terpretations of the Scriptures from one or the oth- 
er of these two difficulties. We are living in an 
age of doubt, but these difficulties are not peculiar 
to the times in which we live. Peter found them 
in the apostolic church and solved them then and 
there. It required only a single sentence from his 
inspired lips to unravel the mysteries of revelation 
and reconcile God's word and works. 

And man who will ponder Peter's explanation, 
though he may have been wallowing in skeptical 
quicksands all his life before, will suddenly find 
revelation hardening beneath him into a granite 
rock on which his faith can plant itself and stand 
secure and triumphant. He declares that our dif- 
ficulties in regard to the meagreness of the dis- 



PRIVATE INTERPRETATION. 141 

closures made by the Bible arise from our misap- 
prehension of the purpose for which a revelation 
was given and that we fail to see divine promises 
fulfilled in human experience because we take too 
narrow a view and give the promise too selfish and 
personal an application. Does the Bible fail to re- 
veal to us much of God and futurity that we long 
to know? Well, says Peter, it was not intended 
to change earth to Heaven and bring God down to 
man. It was only meant to be "a light that shineth 
in a dark place until the day dawn." God never 
meant by inspiring holy men of old to illuminate 
this dark world with spiritual light. With all the 
light which revelation throws upon them this world 
and this life will still be dark. The Bible comes to 
us simply as a lamp to guide us through this world 
of night up to the gates of the city where night 
never comes and where there is no darkness at all. 
Its purpose is something like that of a headlight on 
a locomotive engine. Get on the locomotive with 
the engineer and come thundering down the track 
some dark night. You are passing through a cut 
now, but the headlight does not shine upon the 
banks on either side to discover to you their geo- 
logical formation. And now you are flying over 
an embankment across a beautiful valley ; you may 
long to know what kinds of flowers and plants are 



*42 NO SCRIPTURE OF 

growing in the fields which stretch away on either 
hand but the head light leaves the landscape both 
to the right and the left shrouded in midnight 
gloom and darts not a single ray to satisfy the curi- 
osity of the botanist. You hurry next through a 
tangled forest and you can imagine you hear the 
nimble feet of wild beasts scurrying up the hillsides 
as you approach. You peer out amid the tangled 
branches breathless to catch a glimpse of their re- 
treating forms but darkness impenetrable stands 
like a wall on either side. The headlight of that 
engine will not shine behind the train to show how 
far you have traveled, nor on either side, though 
wonders may cluster all around you, nor above, 
though the heavens may be full of signs, but it will 
throw a flood of light down the track before you 
until the rails will gleam like silver bars. Its one 
and only purpose is to show whether the track is 
clear or obstructed in front of you. Even this it 
will do only to a short distance. It will not flood 
the track with light to the terminus of the road and 
thus reveal your destination from the start. It will 
simply throw its light upon the track ahead suffi- 
ciently far for you to discover and avoid any dan- 
ger that may be there. It is a light that shineth in 
a dark place until the day dawn, not to dispel the 



PRIVATE INTERPRETATION. 143 

darkness, but to guide the traveler through it and 
out of it. 

So the Bible was not given us to teach astrono- 
my, geology, botany or natural history, but sim- 
ply to throw light upon the pathway of salvation. 
It does not show us the end from the beginning — 
a thousand questions concerning the future have 
no answer in the word of God — but it does light up 
the path of duty and of privilege at the present, 
and sufficiently far ahead to enable us to press for- 
ward without fear of danger. It is a light shining 
in a dark place which illuminates the road ahead 
just as fast as we travel. Do your duty according 
to the light which you have this hour and when the 
next hour comes, which is all dark now, you will 
find the light shining upon it and making it plain. 
God's word unfolds before us just in degree as we 
obey it. "If any man will do my will, he shall 
know of the doctrine." God's word is not a sun 
in the heavens but a lamp to our feet and a light to 
our path. It does not dispel the shadows but it 
guides our feet amid the shadows. It does 
give us enough to make the path to heaven so plain 
"that a wayfaring man though a fool need not err 
therein." 

The great questions which divide the Christian 
world are speculative, not practical. Men will in- 



144 NO SCRIPTURE OF 

quire and argue about matters which God has not 
seen fit to reveal and which are not essential to 
their salvation, often to the neglect of the great 
practical duties of daily living which are made 
plain. as noon. We lose much valuable time and 
sometimes our temper also, in discussing the prob- 
lem how God's sovereignty can be reconciled with 
human freedom. Revelation is as silent as death 
on the subject and the probability is that we shall 
never know until our souls bathe in the light of 
the throne. Nor is it at all important to our well 
being either here or hereafter, that we should be 
able to unravel this mystery now. If, however, in- 
stead of undertaking to reconcile human freedom 
with Divine sovereignty we turn to the practical 
question of how to reconcile sinners to God, the 
Bible shines like a calcium light upon the problem 
and makes its solution easy. 

Men get their blood up to fever heat in endeav- 
oring to decide whether the heathen who die with- 
out the light of the Gospel will be finally saved, 
and the Bible is ransacked for proof by either side. 
But with the exception of two or three incidental 
allusions to the subject, revelation utters not a 
word to reward our search or satisfy our doubts. 
Leave speculation in regard to others and ask the 
personal, practical question, Will I be saved at the 



PRIVATE INTERPRETATION. 145 

last? and that book becomes vocal with voices an- 
swering every inquiry and furnishing the fullest in- 
formation. God has given us this volume of truth 
not to discover to us physical and mental science — 
that we can find out for ourselves at our leisure, 
and our souls will not be imperilled meanwhile for 
lack of such knowledge — He has given us this 
book, not to satisfy our curiosity upon questions 
which do not concern us, but simply and solely to 
illuminate a pathway through life by which man 
may ascend from earth to Heaven. The miner's 
lamp illuminates only a narrow circle around him 
down in the mine and leaves all else in Egyptian 
darkness. But the circle of light moves with the 
miner wherever he goes (for he carries the lamp 
on his cap), so that he can always see a few steps 
ahead of him and know that he is going aright. If 
he will but follow that light it will go before him 
like another pillar of fire and will guide his feet 
through the dark and intricate gangways and up 
the shaft until he has reached the surface of the 
earth and stands bathed in golden sunlight with the 
blue heavens above him. 

This world is one vast deep and dark mine and 
we are digging and delving in it. Now and then 
we may discover a gem which sparkles with a 
strange, sweet light, the lingering lustre of a glo- 



146 NO SCRIPTURE OF 

rious age that is gone and a glowing prophecy of a 
brighter world above, but these cannot dissipate 
the gloom of the vast galleries in which we toil. 
Heaven's sunlight can never come down here and 
illuminate these dark chambers, but God can send 
and has sent His word to us as a light to shine in 
this dark place to guide our feet along its rugged, 
winding passages until we reach death and ascend 
through the shaft of the grave to the beautiful 
home of God where the flickering light of revela- 
tion shall be lost in the snow white glow of the 
throne. 

It is only "a light that shineth in a dark place 
until the day dawn," yet blessed forever be God 
that He has sent it, for without it we must have al- 
ways remained in the darkness and never have 
reached the dawn nor the day. All difficulties in 
regard to the scope of revelation vanish when we 
understand its purpose aright. 

The second difficulty, viz. : That arising from the 
unfulfilled prophecies and promises of the Bible will 
also disappear and leave no trace behind if we cease 
to give them a private interpretation and under- 
stand them in all the breadth and depth of their 
meaning. 

The prophecies and promises of God's, word for 
the most part are simply declarations of eternal 



PRIVATE INTERPRETATION. 147 

principles or are the foretelling of effects which will 
follow from causes which are already in operation. 
We err greatly if we suppose that God creates a 
new law or sets in motion a new cause whenever 
in Scripture He promises certain blessings to those 
who shall obey His commandments. He is not 
arbitrarily granting special favors to one individual 
or one nation, but is simply revealing a great law 
by which any other man or nation might attain the 
same result on the same conditions. For example, 
the Psalmist sings, "The righteous shall inherit the 
land and dwell therein forever," and Jesus Himself 
from the Mount of Beatitudes declares "Blessed 
are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." 
Such are the promises and our souls are thrilled 
as we read them and then we turn us about to be- 
hold their fulfillment. What is our disappoint- 
ment to find that the righteous man here, there and 
yonder has inherited nothing but poverty and the 
meek man is pushed aside and down-trodden by 
the proud and haughty as they rush forward to 
seize upon possessions and power. There are 
thousands of the meek and the righteous who live 
in penury and die in obscurity and still the promise 
reads that the meek and the righteous shall inherit 
the earth. There is a wide discrepancy here be- 

JO 



148 NO SCRIPTURE OF 

tween what we read in God's book and what we 
observe in God's world. How can these differ- 
ences be reconciled? Simply by taking a broader 
view. We must cease to give to such prophecies 
our narrow, private, personal interpretations and 
must understand them not as promises of rewards 
to individual men, but as declarations of great gen- 
eral laws which underlie society and which surely, 
albeit slowly, tend to elevate the meek and the 
righteous to the mastery and possession of this 
world. 

A principle may be true in the general which is 
false in many particulars. The soldier on the bat- 
tlefield often imagines that the army to which he 
belongs has suffered defeat because his division is 
compelled to beat a retreat. Could he mount yon- 
der hill and overlook the entire field he might be- 
hold many points where his comrades had been 
worsted in the fight but he would hardly notice 
these when he beheld a general advance along the 
whole line of his own army and saw the banners of 
the foe disappearing in tumultuous flight in the 
distance. Let the general victory be never so de- 
cisive and let it be complete at every point, still 
all will not share in it. There will be many brave 
boys who fell in the fight upon whose ears the 
shouts of victory will never break. We read in the 



PRIVATE INTERPRETATION. 149 

papers that the army was victorious, but we do not 
understand that every individual soldier in that 
army escaped the shot of the foe and came off tri- 
umphant. Temporary defeat and final victory are 
perfectly consistent. Individual failure and gen- 
eral success are very commonly linked together. 
When, therefore, we read in Scripture that the 
meek and the righteous shall inherit the earth, we 
must understand God as disclosing a great general 
law as wide as the world, and as declaring general 
and final result,as far-reaching as time,and we must 
not, therefore, expect the perfect fulfillment of such 
prophecies in every period of time nor yet that 
every individual will get his share of the inheri- 
tance. There may be dark ages when the unright- 
eous and the haughty shall strut as lords of the land 
for awhile and there may be many thousands of 
God's meek and righteous heirs who will never 
get their inheritance in this world even where 
meekness and righteousness are dominant. Still 
the great general truth that meekness and right- 
eousness are destined to possess and rule this globe 
of ours is untouched by these temporary and ex- 
ceptional cases. 

The prophecy is of no private interpretation. 
God would not offer earthly possessions as the re- 
ward of Christian virtues, lest any man should cov- 



150 NO SCRIPTURE OF 

et and cultivate the virtues simply for the sake of 
the inheritance. God aims to break the shell of 
human selfishness and get man out of himself. He 
will not appeal to his covetousness to induce him 
to become Christian. But He will expand and en- 
noble the human soul by the assurance that its 
Christlike virtues are destined to live and triumph 
in the earth and that while they may bring no re- 
ward to their possessor, save that of a good con- 
science, they shall nevertheless live after him and 
secure an inheritance of blessing to millions yet un- 
born. One day is with God as a thousand years. 
Temporary failure is only the refluent wave of a 
rising tide gathering strength to roll higher up the 
beach the next time it comes in. There may be 
many checks and apparent defeats to the principle, 
but God, who sees the end from the beginning has 
said that righteousness shall yet cover the earth 
even as the waters cover the face of the great deep. 
Nor is this prophecy one that makes large de- 
mands upon our credulity. Faith need not strain 
her eagle vision looking down the distant future to 
behold this result. The history of the past abun- 
dantly illustrates and verifies the principle of the 
supremacy of the Christlike. And a scientific ex- 
amination of society to-day will convince any one 
that the spindles are now at work twisting the 



PRIVATE INTERPRETATION. 151 

cords which shall bind this world into captivity to 
righteousness and meekness. 

There was a time far back in human history 
when Sampson and Hercules, the Cyclops and the 
giants were rulers in the earth. Brute force then 
possessed the globe and the gentle and just went 
down before it like grass before the scythe. 

This was succeeded by the military age in which 
genius combined and organized physical force for 
the conquest of the earth. Might then rode at the 
head of iron-armed and granite-hearted legions and 
right was not as much as admitted into the coun- 
cils of war. Men were valued then in proportion 
to their courage and heartlessness. What were 
called the masculine virtues but what were in reali- 
tl only beastly qualities, were the all dominant 
forces then. The meek, the gentle and the tender- 
hearted of mankind had no inheritance except an 
inheritance of contempt and scorn. Might was the 
only standard of right, and courage and cruelty the 
qualities that insured the possession of the earth. 
Even as late as feudal times men entered the lists in 
deadly combat to decide questions of right and 
wrong and the one who survived was crowned 
champion of the right, for no other reason than 
that he had slain his adversary. Through all these 
ages there was little to warrant the belief that the 



152 NO SCRIPTURE OF 

meek and righteous would one day sit upon the 
throne, the crowned and sceptered rulers of the 
earth. Socrates appealed to the true and the right 
and the deadly hemlock draught soon silenced his 
voice. Jesus came as the embodiment of meek- 
ness and righteousness and the cross was his only 
inheritance. The martyrs lifted up their voices in 
behalf of the true, the merciful and the just, and 
brute force tore them limb from limb and waded 
through their blood. 

Yet the leaven of the Christlike was at work all 
the while softening human nature and transform- 
ing the spirit of the age. Greece killed Socrates 
but could not bury him. The Jews crucified Christ 
and buried Him, but they could not keep Him in 
His tomb. He rose again and walked the earth, 
entering human homes despite bolted doors and 
penetrating human hearts notwithstanding they 
were covered with armor of mail. Rome sent the 
martyrs to Heaven in a chariot of fire, but they 
still lingered on the earth. 'The blood of the 
martyrs was the seed of the church." Three cen- 
turies after the Roman Procurator legalized the 
crucifixion of Jesus, Jesus had conquered the Ro- 
man emperor and His teachings became the re- 
ligion of the Roman empire. Rome herself with 
all her iron legions has been destroyed, but Chris- 



PRIVATE INTERPRETATION. 153 

tianity survives to convince the world that there is 
something "stronger than the strong man armed. ,, 
The coliseum, where the martyrs were torn to 
pieces by thousands is all in ruins, while Christian 
temples surmounted by the cross are adorned with 
its spoils. The meek and righteous Jesus has in- 
herited the earth which once poured its tribute in- 
to the lap of haughty cruel Rome. The spirit of 
the age in which we live is a marvelous advance 
upon the past towards the Christlike. The ruler 
now is not the man who wears the crown and bears 
the sword. There is a power behind the 
throne. The signature of the public conscience 
must be attached to every edict before it becomes 
a law, and the ruler who dares to defy the common 
conscience of his people will soon find his people 
defying him. The meek and righteous are far from 
being in possession of all that is their inheritance, 
and yet it is but fair to say that the public con- 
science to-day is in the main opposed to pride and 
cruelty and wrong, and on the side of justice, gen- 
tleness and meekness. The people may be hood- 
winked by designing demagogues so as to mistake 
injustice for righteousness, but when they discover 
their mistake they are generally swift to correct it 
by hurling their deceivers from power. Righteous- 
ness to-day inherits the land to such an extent that 



i54 NO SCRIPTURE OF 

every man holds his title to possession and power 
subject to the approval of the public sense of jus- 
tice and right. The meek men are coming to the 
front; the men who trust more in the justice and 
goodness of their cause than in the strength of 
their arm; the men who are willing to work and 
suffer and wait. These are the men who are get- 
ting hold of the scepter, whose power is recognized 
as a mighty factor in the affairs of the world to-day 
and who are destined to hand this earth down as an 
inheritance to the children of meekness through- 
out the ages to come. The poet solved the riddle 
of the past when he sung: 

"Right forever -on the scaffold, 
Wrong forever on the throne, 

Yet that scaffold sways the future 
And behind the dim unknown, 

Standeth God within the shadow, 
Keeping watch o'er all His own." 

Not only history, but science at last confesses 
that righteousness and meekness must inherit this 
earth and dwell therein forever. Joseph Cook in 
one of his Boston lectures has, from a purely scien- 
tific standpoint, demonstrated that conscious recti- 
tude and innocency is the one human force to-day 
before which everything else goes down. It gives 



PRIVATE INTERPRETATION. 155 

to the human eye and face a light before which not 
only wild beasts, but also the beastly in man quails 
and cowers. The solar light as he terms it which 
shines from the soul and through the face of the 
meek and righteous makes its possessor a king and 
commander over men who are destitute of it. They 
who shall be kings and priests unto God hereafter 
are kings and priests among men now, not by vir- 
tue of a crown and miter, but by virtue of a nature 
which is all commanding and all ministering. 

Science declares that the righteous stand erect 
and lift their faces heavenward while the conscious- 
ly unrighteous hang down their heads and hands 
in gloom. The one is rising in conscious power 
and the other is sinking smitten with paralysis. 
This solar light which dimly illuminates the coun- 
tenances of all saints glowed with intenser luster 
from the face of Moses when he came down from 
the mount so that the people could not stand be- 
fore him, and in Jesus it reached its culmination in 
the transfiguration before whose glory even the 
chosen three trembled with fear and were bewil- 
dered. Bodily levitation, which is the name given 
to the upward look and carriage and gesture of the 
consciously upright, lifted Enoch and Elijah from 
the earth and carried Jesus from Olivet through 
the bright cloud into the Heaven of heavens. 



156 NO SCRIPTURE OF 

These two moral forces which science discovers in 
the saints have only to be carried up to a climax 
when the one blazes out into a transfiguration and 
the other soars aloft in an ascension. These forces 
inhere in every meek and righteous soul and just 
in degree as they are developed will they transfig- 
ure and elevate the meek and the righteous until 
all this earth shall become their inheritance and 
possession. History and science unite their voices 
and proclaim in tones of thunder that God's pro- 
phecy has not failed, but that from the hour the 
prediction was made, the result has steadily been 
working out and that the forces are now at work 
which must ultimately realize the prophetic prom- 
ise. 

What is true of this prophecy is true of every 
other in God's word. Only cease to give them a 
"private interpretation," don't limit their fulfill- 
ment to the narrow circle of an individual's exper- 
ience, or of a single nation's history; don't under- 
stand them as promises of personal favoritism, but 
as declarations of eternal principles, the result of 
whose action God sees from the beginning. Give 
them scope and time to unfold and they will be 
found as true to human experience as shadow is to 
substance. "Heaven and earth may pass away but 



PRIVATE INTERPRETATION. 157 

one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the 
law till all be fulfilled." 

Divine truth is not a dead thing. It is all life. 
Man introduced death on the earth and Divine 
truth fled into Heaven. God sent it back, little by 
little, in revelations to a dead and dying world, and 
He means it shall stay here until it has all been in- 
carnated in human form and made to live over 
again in human experience. This volume of life, 
with not a promise lost and not one line erased, 
shall one day walk this earth with human feet, shall 
act through human hands and speak through hu- 
man lips. Its work is not done until human exper- 
ience shall verify and illustrate its every truth. But 
its work, like that of the leaven, is slow and silent 
and gradual, and its full living realization therefore 
can be beheld only by him who is far sighted and 
sweeps his eye along the ages that are past and that 
are yet to come. 

"Blind unbelief is sure to err 
And scan his work in vain, 

God is His own interpreter 
And he will make it plain." 



The Transitory and the 
Permanent. 



THE TRANSITORY AND THE PERMA- 
NENT. 

Whose voice then shook the earth : but now he hath promised, say- 
ing, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this 
■word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are 
shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be 
shaken may remain.— Hebrews XII : 26-27. 

The idea in this passage seems to be that we are 
living in a world of change,that all things in nature 
are moving like a panorama before us and are 
passing away. This truth, within the narrow cir- 
cle of observation and experience is one with which 
we are all familiar. From our childhood we have 
seen the bursting buds of springtime disappear to 
make room for the flowers of summer; and the 
flowers in turn vanish to give place to the purple 
fruitage of autumn; and the fruit pass away to 
leave the bare branches a sobbing harpsichord for 
the bleak winds of winter. 

We do not pass far along life's pathway before 
we become aware that this law of change is broad- 
er than the circle of the seasons. Let a young man 
leave his home, and after an absence of twenty 
years return. He remembers all things as they 
were when he left, but he never finds them thus 
again. The trees have grown larger, the ivy has 

161 



162 THE TRANSITORY 

spread further over the walls of the old home and 
the moss is much thicker upon its roof. Father 
and mother are either in their graves or are gray- 
haired and wrinkled old people now. Brothers and 
sisters with whom he romped in childhood are 
staid, middle-aged persons now with homes and 
families of their own. He looks around for his 
playmates of former years, but they have all either 
passed away or moved away. He seeks his old 
time haunts, but scarcely recognizes them. The 
school is not the same. The scholars are all dif- 
ferent and another master is behind the desk. 
There is a new miller at the mill, and the old black- 
smith is no longer at the anvil. Slowly and sadly 
the truth dawns upon him that the past has moved 
forever out of sight, that life means moving for- 
ward ever and that there is no return from former 
scenes. 

Beyond the circle of our observation and exper- 
ience history teaches on a broader scale the same 
solemn lesson. Take up any account a hundred 
years old of our own country and you will be star- 
tled to find how antiquated it is. It will describe 
log cabins, bridle paths and Indian trails where 
now we find the great cities and steel railways of 
the west. Where now the steamship on the ocean 
and the steamboat on our rivers churn the waters 



AND THE PERMANENT. 163 

into foam, then vessels with sails or oars crept 
slowly and lazily along. Where now the lightning 
flashes thought along the wires across a continent 
in a second of time, then the old post-chaise came 
lumbering along with the news at the rate of sev- 
enty-five miles in a day. Then people carried tin 
lanterns along the streets at night and went to bed 
by the light of a tallow candle, where now our cities 
blaze with electric light and our homes are radiant 
with saffron jets of gas. Then the farmer whetted 
his scythe, and swung his cradle and plied his flail 
for weeks, where now the mowing and the reaping, 
and the threshing machine cut down and thresh out 
a harvest in a day. 

Take a wider range of vision and go back to the 
splendid civilization of ancient times. Read how 
Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome in turn 
dominated the earth with their armies, and how 
their literature and art made their capitals centers 
of wisdom and beauty that dazzled the world ; and 
then go search for their greatness to-day. Where 
are Thebes, and Babylon, and Nineveh now? A 
heap of ruins on the Euphrates or the Tigris is all 
that is left of them. A few rolls of papyri, a few 
monuments covered with hieroglyphics and a few 
11 



i6 4 THE TRANSITORY 

cuneiform inscriptions engraved upon the rocks 
are all that remain of their literature. 

The people themselves have vanished, leaving 
nothing behind them but their mummies, which 
are being utilized to-day as fuel to run locomotive 
engines. Even Athens and Rome, of more mod- 
ern date, are rapidly moving out of sight. Pericles 
and Caesar could they rise from their graves, 
would not recognize these modern cities as their 
ancient capitals. The marble of the Parthenon is 
black with age and its inimitable sculptures are 
gnawed away by the tooth of time. The Coliseum, 
gutted of its magnificence, is only a colossal, 
naked wall, and the palace of the Caesars is now 
but a subterranean labyrinth. Greek and Roman 
literature, though still alive, is fading slowly away 
and now shines only in the libraries of the learned. 
The nations of the past are gone or are going, and 
soon only the owl hooting from some moss-cov- 
ered tower, or the bittern screaming among the 
wild grass and reeds will tell where they once 
stood. 

The text under consideration, however, carries 
us farther than history can go, and declares that 
this same chorus of continual change was sound- 
ing through the prehistoric ages to the same sol- 
emn measure as now, and that its last note has not 



AND THE PERMANENT. 165 

yet been heard. Modern science, groping around 
among the laws of nature with its dark lantern, has 
just thrown the light upon the face of this truth of 
revelation and waked it up from its slumber of 
ages. Science teaches that our globe was not al- 
ways what it now is. In the beginning (whenever 
that was), we are told that the matter of which our 
earth is composed was so intensely heated and ex- 
panded that it floated in space as a vapor, lighter 
than hydrogen gas. As the ages rolled away this 
glowing star dust radiated its heat and slowly 
cooled. As it cooled it contracted its bulk and be- 
came more dense until at length the vapor became 
a liquid. For ages more our earth swept its fiery 
course around the sun as a red-hot ball of molten 
matter. In course of time the surface had suffi- 
ciently cooled for a crust of rock to form, like the 
shell of an Qgg, around the liquid core. Still cycles 
rolled away, the earth's crust growing thicker all 
the time, while its outer surface, swept by fierce 
storms, scathed by wild lightnings, and corroded 
by an acid atmosphere, was being pulverized into 
soil. The vapors in the atmosphere at last con- 
densed into water and formed rivers and lakes and 
oceans, while the dry land grew green with the 
lowest forms of vegetable life. By-and-by a tem- 
perature was reached which made animal life pos- 



166 THE TRANSITORY 

sible, and at once the coral insect began to build 
its strange masonry in the deep, and fishes splashed 
their finny oars as they started to explore the 
ocean. Age after age new forms of life appeared 
and old ones disappeared on land and sea, until 
finally man steps upon the stage of action and calls 
himself lord of creation. During all these periods 
the surface of our globe has been rising and falling 
like the waves of the sea. Vast ranges of moun- 
tains have been upheaved and continents have sunk 
beneath the ocean. Our earth at times has poured 
out floods of lava to relieve her internal fever, and 
at others has shuddered in earthquakes from a sud- 
den chill. We talk of the solid earth and think of 
the ground beneath our feet as something fixed 
and stable. But the earth's crust is now not more 
than a hundred miles thick — the merest shell 
around a molten core, seething and heaving with 
internal fire. In consequence, this crust is never 
at rest, but is constantly slowly rising in one place 
and falling in another, while at times an island sud- 
denly disappears and occasionally, as we have rea- 
son to remember, an earthquake jars a continent 
and shakes a city into ruins. 

There is nothing permanent and stable here. 
Eternal change has kept creation's cradle rocking 
until now, and will continue to shake the earth for 



AND THE PERMANENT. 167 

ages yet to come. The final catastrophe, foretold 
in Scripture, when our globe shall be wrapped in 
a winding sheet of fire, is rendered very probable 
by the discoveries of physical science. A time 
must come in the future from the process of cool- 
ing and contraction, when another gigantic crush- 
ing in of the earth's crust will take place. When- 
ever that occurs it were easy for the continents to 
be submerged beneath seas of boiling lava, whose 
fiery waves will burn up every green thing and 
leave our globe a blackened, smoking slag. 

I do not claim that the teachings of science and 
the Bible are identical. But while they differ 
widely in details there is a marked general 
agreement. Both teach that through evolutions 
and revolutions the earth and man have reached 
their present state, and that the process is not yet 
complete. Science digs out of the rocks the evi- 
dence that our globe has been shaken and shattered 
in the past and that it will be again, and revelation 
looks up to God and cries, "Whose voice then 
shook the earth but now He hath promised, saying 
yet once more I shake not the earth only but also 
Heaven." 

Again the passage implies that this change is a 
real progress from lower to higher forms and is in 
obedience to God's great law of creation. Just as 



i68 THE TRANSITORY 

a scaffolding is erected and within it the edifice is 
reared, and then, when the building is complete, 
the scaffolding is torn down and removed, so in the 
plan of unfolding creation as any form has served 
its purpose and become useless it is shaken down 
and disappears. Evolution is no discovery of 
science. It was taught in Scripture long before 
science dreamed of it. It was an inspired pen that 
wrote, "First the blade, then the ear, and then the 
full corn in the ear." This regular progression 
from lower towards higher forms marks all the 
works of God. If we go back to the Mosaic account 
of creation we shall find that in general the scien- 
tific order obtains. Creation did not spring into 
being all at once at the fiat of God. First God 
created the heavens and the earth. But they were 
without form and void and darkness was upon the 
face of the deep. It was simply the creation of the 
elements in a chaotic state. Next God said "Let 
there be light" and the darkness disappeared. Then 
came the gathering together of the waters and the 
division of the earth into land and ocean. Next 
came the creation of vegetable life — grass, herbs 
and trees. Then in due time came the creation of 
fishes in the sea and fowls in the air. Next in or- 
der came cattle and wild beasts and creeping 
things, and finally to crown the series, God created 



AND THE PERMANENT. 169 

man in his own image. The record of the rocks 
and that of the Book are in harmony thus far. Dig 
down into the mountains and you shall find that 
the oldest fossils are vegetables, then come marine 
animals, next birds, then beasts, and then men. 

Moreover the rocks will show that the unfolding 
of each type of being has pursued the same order. 
In the beginning God commanded each species to 
multiply, i. e. unfold into all the varieties and forms 
of which the species was capable. Just as to-day 
the oak is enfolded in the acorn, so originally God 
locked up the species with its endless varieties in a 
single pair. From that primal pair the species was 
to be evolved, not haphazard, but by a law of regu- 
lar progression. Go ask the geologist if the 
oldest forms of life were not the lowest and wheth- 
er each in turn has not been succeeded by a high- 
er and better form. The first plants upon our 
globe were flowerless ferns and rushes, and from 
these, step by step, the flora has unfolded until the 
earth to-day is covered with a robe of blossoms 
and the air is burdened with their perfume. The 
oldest animals were fishes with cartilaginous skele- 
tons and without eyes, as much inferior to a salm- 
on or trout of to-day as Noah's ark was to an ocean 
steamer of the White Star Line. The rocks are 
paved with animal and vegetable forms, which are 



170 THE TRANSITORY 

now extinct, but in every case the form that has 
vanished was succeeded by another of a higher or- 
der. The fossils in the mountains are the gar- 
ments which nature has outgrown and has laid 
aside, and they serve to show the humility of her 
origin and the progress of her growth. 

Scientific evolution and Scriptural evolution are 
wide apart in details, but in their general trend 
there is substantial agreement. Science starts with 
dead matter and supposes that it organized itself 
into some lowest form of life, and that from this 
first form were developed by natural law, without 
any creative act, in regular gradation, one form out 
of another, until at last man was reached. It 
teaches that a plant produced a polyp, and a polyp 
a fish, and a fish a reptile, and a reptile a bird, and 
a bird a beast, and a beast a monkey and a monkey 
a man. 

Scripture on the other hand starts with a separate 
creation for each class of creatures and then leaves 
the class to unfold under natural law into many 
branches, and perfect itself by passing through 
many forms. God created plants, fishes, fowls, 
creeping things, cattle, beasts and man, and en- 
dowed them with capacities to multiply varieties 
and improve their condition until the multitudi- 
nous species, and endless varieties of flora and fau- 



AND THE PERMANENT. 171 

na should be reached, which cover the earth to- 
day. I submit that until the missing links between 
widely different species are found, the Scriptural 
theory is more scientific and rational than the Dar- 
winian. 

But while the two theories clash in regard to 
their teaching respecting the origin of living forms, 
they agree perfectly in teaching that from the be- 
ginning until now there has been a constant evolu- 
tion and steady progress and improvement. Science 
expresses its faith in this truth by the phrases, "The 
struggle for existence," and "The survival of the 
fittest." Scripture epitomizes its teaching upon 
this subject by the declaration, "And the word — 
yet once more — signifieth the removal of those 
things which are shaken as of things which are 
made, that those things that cannot be shaken may 
remain." 

But the one great and all important teaching of 
this passage is that this system of change is not 
only a progression from lower to higher and bet- 
ter forms, but that it is steadily working toward a 
final result which shall be changeless and eternal. 

Thus far science and revelation have marched 
side by side, but just here they part company. 
Science sees no purpose in nature, but only a pro- 
cess. It recognizes no directing intelligence and 



172 THE TRANSITORY 

knows nothing of a final end. Nature is only a sys- 
tem of endless mutation, evolution, and revolution, 
with no God at the beginning and no outcome at 
the end. Science starts with a cloud of star dust 
floating in space and traces it until it becomes the 
solid ball which we call our earth. It follows mat- 
ter then through countless transformations, each 
rising higher in order of being than its predecessor. 
It sees successively rising above the ground ferns, 
and flowers, and polyps, and fish, and reptiles, and 
birds, and beasts and at last man, highest and 
grandest of all. But then it sees man die and be- 
holds his body decompose into its original ele- 
ments. He who was the outcome of all the pro- 
gressive changes of all the ages and to whose pro- 
duction all lower forms of life have contributed, 
science sees go back to dust to fatten the soil and 
nourish grass and grain, and thus in turn himself 
become food for fish and fowl and reptile and 
beast. It is as if nature should labor through mil- 
lions of ages to give birth to a child and then turn 
round and devour it as soon as it was born. 

Human reason revolts at such teaching and de- 
mands that for all this plowing and planting and 
reaping and threshing, there shall be some harvest 
garnered. It will consent to change through 
countless ages if at last something permanent shall 



AND THE PERMANENT. 173 

be the result. It will agree that life shall pass 
through a thousand deaths and have as many resur- 
rections if at last an immortal being shall emerge 
from the grave to die no more. But it utters an 
unmistakable and uncompromising protest against 
endless change to no purpose, and against living 
only for the sake of dying. If materialism can dis- 
cover nothing which survives the death of man, 
then the deepest and strongest instincts of human 
intelligence must turn away from it disappointed 
and disgusted. 

What science cannot discover, but what human 
nature craves, and human reason demands, revela- 
tion comes to supply. It reads that the earth (at 
first) was without form and void, and that darkness 
was upon the face of the great deep ; it reads of a 
deluge, and of God's voice shaking the earth in the 
past, and that other convulsions await her in the 
future. There is a fiery baptism coming in which 
"the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the 
earth also and the things that are therein shall be 
burned up." But it does not stop there. There is 
a method in nature's madness. She has some 
worthy end in view. The transitory is to be suc- 
ceeded by the permanent, the temporary by the 
eternal. Listen to the bugle notes of revelation 
as they ring out over a world on fire : "Nevertheless 



174 THE TRANSITORY 

according to His promise, we look for a new heav- 
en and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteous- 
ness." 

Paul from the summit of inspiration lets his eagle 
vision sweep over the ages of the past and down 
the centuries to come, and then shouts in the ear 
of a bewildered world God's ultimate design: 
"Whose voice then shook the earth, but now he 
hath promised, saying, yet once more I shake not 
the earth only, but also Heaven, and this word yet 
once more signifieth the removing of those things 
which are shaken as of things which are made, that 
those things which cannot be shaken may remain." 
When the lightning and thunder are past we are 
to expect a purer atmosphere. When the blos- 
soms fall, we are to look for the fruitage. When 
the scaffolding is taken down we are to behold the 
edifice. When the chrysalis bursts its cerements 
Ave are to look for the butterfly rising on golden 
wings above its tomb. 

The microscope and the telescope will make 
discoveries much farther than the unaided human 
eye can see, but science with all her instruments 
can behold only the physical. 

Beyond the power of the microscope and the tel- 
escope, beyond the power of the crucible and the 
subtle agents of the laboratory, inspiration discov- 



AND THE PERMANENT. 175 

ers the spiritual rising like a Phoenix from the 
ashes of the physical. Man is the outcome of all 
nature's workings. He is the summit of the long 
and ascending plane of life. But the human body 
is not the man and when it falls in death the man 
does not die. The body was only the crutches 
with which the immature spirit supported itself, 
but when the spirit can stand and walk alone you 
may bury the crutches out of sight. Don't look in 
the grave to find your departed loved ones. The 
disciples made that mistake more than eighteen 
hundred years ago, and an angel sent by God whis- 
pered to them loud enough for all succeeding ages 
to hear, "Why seek ye the living among the dead? 
He is not here, He is risen." No human eye ever 
saw a man nor ever can. We see his features and 
his form, but these are only the house in which 
he resides. That something within which thinks 
and feels and loves and wills, is the real man, and 
him no microscope can discover, and over him 
death has no power. When the body falls in ruin 
he does not go down into the grave, but rises into 
a new and higher state of being. The physical is 
temporary and transitory, the spiritual is perma- 
nent and eternal. God has not wrought through 
all the ages for naught. "The mills of the gods 
grind slowly but they grind very fine." The mater- 



176 THE TRANSITORY 

ial chaff and successive hulls which enclosed the 
precious kernel, one after another have been sep- 
arated and removed, until at last the grinding is 
complete — this last covering of flesh and blood is 
stripped off — and then comes forth the fine flower 
of a spiritual existence as invisible as ether and as 
imperishable as God. 

Not only does God through successive stages of 
perishing creations at last reach a stable and ever- 
lasting result, but human labor, also, doomed to 
disappointment all through life, has the promise 
of imperishable guerdon at last. Our life work is 
not to travel round a treadmill and end just where 
we begun, though to the eye of sense this seems 
to be the only result of living. "We brought noth- 
ing into this world and it is certain we can carry 
nothing out." So far as material possessions and 
worldly honors are concerned we leave the world 
just as naked as we entered it. But be not de- 
ceived by appearances. While much of our life's 
work can be shaken and will be removed by death, 
something that cannot be shaken will survive and 
remain. If we acquire wealth in houses or land, 
flocks and herds, gold and silver, it will take to it- 
self wings and fly away. If we win honor and 
fame, office and influence, power and place, they 
will slip through our fingers and soon all be gone. 



AND THE PERMANENT. 177 

We may subdue and govern nations and build up 
splendid civilizations, but they, too, will pass away 
as a dream fades from memory. We may spend 
our lives in founding vast charities and cover the 
land with hospitals, asylums and colleges, and 
these also will crumble to dust, as well as the peo- 
ple who are benefited by them. We may dig deep 
in science and literature and amass the treasures 
of mind. We shall thus secure something which 
death cannot destroy, but we shall find it a useless 
possession in the land to which we are going. The 
wisdom of men is foolishness with God, and future 
discoveries will render our present knowledge fool- 
ishness with man also. Hence it is written, 
"Whether there be knowledge it shall vanish 
away." But all does not perish. The grave is 
greedy and devours much of human achievement, 
but there are some things which even death can- 
not swallow. 

Send a boy to school, and after he has mastered 
all the studies of the course, the institution may be 
burned down, the books may all be destroyed, even 
the knowledge acquired may be of no practical use 
to him whatever in his lifework, but the thought 
power and mind-discipline acquired are inde- 
structible and will be his invaluable possession for- 
ever. 



178 THE TRANSITORY 

So man's untiring search after truth all his life and 
throughout all ages, may or may not be rewarded 
with clear discovery. All his efforts and sacrifices 
to establish truth and right on the earth may be de- 
feated, and over his failure error and wrong flaunt 
their black flag in triumph. But in his search af- 
ter, and his labors for, the true, there has been de- 
veloped in him a love of truth which the crash of 
the universe cannot eclipse or destroy. 

So also a life of righteousness may seem to be 
overwhelmed by injustice and hypocrisy, but above 
the dark waves of fraud will float like a white al- 
batross the love of justice which is indestructible. 
Carlyle, the most rugged thinker of the nineteenth 
century, has said : "The great soul of this world is 
just. With a voice soft as the harmony of spheres 
yet stronger, sterner, than all thunders, the mes- 
sage does now and then reach us through the hol- 
low jargon of things. This great fact we live in 
and were made by." Our life work is to get our- 
selves in harmony with the spirit of the universe. 
By lives of strict justice we create a hungering and 
thirsting after righteousness, so that it becomes our 
meat and our drink to do our Master's will. This 
love of justice once born can never die ; it is one of 
the eternal verities in the life of the mind. 

A man may spend his life in seeking after the 



AND THE PERMANENT. 179 

pure and the good, and never find them in the 
world nor realize them in himself. Holiness is a 
flower of rarer bloom than the century plant. Our 
best motives are seldom perfectly pure, but are al- 
most always mixed with some dross. But though 
we struggle after holiness till death, and never 
reach it in its fullness, the effort has not been in 
vain. We have caught glimpses of the beauty of 
holiness and have fallen in love with it. That pas- 
sion once kindled in the soul neither time nor death 
can extinguish. The love of holiness is the bed- 
rock in all right thinking minds, so that to shake it 
would be to wreck the moral universe. And so of 
every other moral principle ; right living begets in 
us a love for it which is stronger than death, and 
which remains untouched by the dissolution of the 
body and must be as immortal as mind. These sev- 
eral loves make up what we call moral character, 
and this is what remains unharmed of our life work 
when everything else is shaken to pieces. Not 
what we do, but what we become in the doing is 
stamped with immortality. All that we have 
wrought out will crumble, perish and vanish, but 
what has been wrought in us, is an "inheritance 
that is incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not 
away." 
12 



180 THE TRANSITORY 

Just as the loves in us of the true, the just, the 
right, the pure, and the good make up moral char- 
acter, so the ensemble of the objects of these loves 
constitutes our God. All that we know of God is 
that He is the embodiment of all that is just and 
true and good, and holy. He is to us the focal 
point in which all moral principles meet, and the 
fountain head whence all virtues flow, and the loves 
which make up moral character are therefore none 
other than the love of God. 

Let death with vandal hand strew all the uni- 
verse with wreck and ruin, but let God and man 
and the love of God survive and heaven is eternally 
secure. No matter where Heaven is, God is every- 
where and wherever moral character can feast its 
love upon truth and justice, goodness and holiness, 
there is heaven as unshakable as the throne of the 
Eternal. 

Let that which is perishable fall and vanish. That 
which cannot be shaken will remain. When the 
cities of earth in the last conflagration are tottering 
to their fall, above the fire and smoke which envel- 
ope them will rise the gilded domes and glittering 
spires of the "city that hath foundations whose 
builder and maker is God." Death and darkness 
are not the end of all human existence. "Dust thou 
art, to dust thou returnest" was not spoken of the 



AND THE PERMANENT. 181 

soul. Above earth's vast necropolis, over the 
graves of all the ages, spiritual man shall walk 
through the gates into the city and be forever with 
the Lord. 

No honest labor in this universe is lost. Ap- 
parent failure and defeat, no less than success and 
victory, are chiseling character into the Christ-like. 
Death only ends the evil but cannot touch the fin- 
ished work. "Blessed are the dead which die in 
the Lord. They rest from their labors and their 
works do follow them." Out of all this withering, 
dying foliage comes at last a flower of fadeless, 
deathless bloom. Light after darkness, and life 
after death, is the song both of nature and revela- 
tion. Forward, brother and be not dismayed. "Look 
not behind you neither stay in all the plain. Es- 
cape to the mountain." "Unter die graben, oben 
die sterne," — Beneath us are graves, above are the 
stars. 

"Here eyes do regard you 

In eternity's stillness; 

Here is all fullness 

Ye brave, to reward you ; 

Work and despair not." 



The Sin of Aaron. 



THE SIN OF AARON. 



And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it 
off. So they gave it me : then I cast it into the fire, and there came out 
this calf.— Exodus XXXII : 24. 



These words constitute the excuse which Aaron 
offered to Moses for the part which he had taken 
in making the golden calf. Moses had gone up 
into Mt. Sinai and had tarried there so long that 
the people became impatient for his return. The 
mountain was covered with clouds and fierce light- 
enings wrapped its summit in devouring fires. 
Whether Moses still lived or whether he had per- 
ished on the mountain no one could tell. The 
suspense at last became intolerable and they broke 
out in open rebellion against him and repudiated 
him as their leader. Assembling themselves in the 
presence of Aaron, who was Moses' representative 
in his absence, they demanded that he should pro- 
vide another leader to take the place of Moses, 
saying, "Up, make us gods which shall go before 
us ; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us 
up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what has 
become of him." A crisis has been reached. The 
people are in the spirit for rebellion. The situation 

J85 



186 THE SIN OF AARON. 

is threatening. Something must be done, and 
Aaron, for the purpose of gaining time temporized 
with their demand. They demanded that he 
should make them gods, and he, affecting compli- 
ance with their demand, requested that they should 
bring their earrings of gold to him for the purpose. 
He probably intended this move as a checkmate to 
them. He did not believe that they would thus 
sacrifice their ornaments, and if they refused, the 
difficulty of the situation was relieved. Even if 
they complied with his request, he thought they 
would do it tardily and thus time would be con- 
sumed. Meanwhile he expected Moses to return 
and render all further proceeding in the matter 
useless. To his amazement they promptly brought 
their jewels and laid them at his feet. Their love 
of idolatry was greater than their love of gold. 
The plan which he hoped would relieve him of dif- 
ficulty is tightening like a vise upon him and ren- 
dering him powerless — a not unfrequent result 
when a man temporizes with evil for policy's sake. 
He has entered into a tacit agreement to make 
them a god on condition of their furnishing the 
gold, and the gold is now presented. The first step 
in wrong doing forces the second. He casts it in- 
to the fire, melts it and moulds it into a golden 
calf. A graver's tool is next applied to perfect 



THE SIN OF AARON. 187 

the moulder's art, and at last there stands a god, 
the work of men's hands, ready for worship. 

And now another step in idolatry must be taken. 
This god must have an altar. So Aaron proceeds 
to build an altar. There is nothing left to be done 
now but to issue a proclamation and call the people 
together for worship. So Aaron proclaimed the 
morrow as a feast unto the Lord, well knowing 
what lord the people would worship, and they 
rose up early on the morrow and offered burnt 
offerings and brought peace offerings and the peo- 
ple sat down to eat and to drink and rose up to 
play." The very end which he was seeking to 
avert he has been a principal agent in bringing 
about. His example ought to teach men every- 
where the clanger of becoming a party to evil in 
any measure, for any purpose. Once embark with 
sinners in an unholy enterprise, even though it be 
in the hope and for the purpose of defeating their 
object, and you cannot be certain of controlling 
their course and consequently can never foretell 
where you will land. Aaron is a pitiable specta- 
cle. He meant well throughout, and yet he who 
had just been appointed God's high priest to min- 
ister at the altars of Jehovah finds himself, he 
scarcely knows how, at the head of the people of- 
fering- sacrifice to a golden calf. 



i88 THE SIN OF AARON. 

Just at this juncture Moses descends the mount, 
and when he hears the shouting and singing and 
beholds the dancing of the idolatrous revelers, his 
righteous indignation waxes hot. First he took 
the golden calf and ground it to powder and 
strewed the dust upon the water and made the 
people drink of it. Having thus destroyed the idol 
he next turns to Aaron as the representative and 
responsible head of the Jewish church, and de- 
mands an explanation of this sacrilege. Said he, 
"What did this people unto thee that thou hast 
brought so great a sin upon them?" Aaron replies, 
"Let not the anger of my Lord wax hot. Thou 
knowest the people that they are set on mischief. 
For they said unto me, Make us gods which shall 
go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that 
brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not 
what has become of him; and I said unto them, 
Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. 
So they gave it me ; then I cast it into the fire and 
there came out this calf." 

The passage is a mixture of truth and falsehood. 
The truth in it is that what he actually did was in- 
significant as compared with the result which fol- 
lowed, and was only one of many causes which pro- 
duced it. He simply told the people to bring 
their gold to him, and, when they brought it, he 



THE SIN OF AARON. 189 

cast it into the fire. They demanded that the idol 
should be made, they brought the gold to him for 
the purpose, the fire melted it, the mould gave it 
shape, the artificers engraved it and the people 
brought sacrifices and worshiped it. He did a 
little, and men and natural laws and forces did the 
balance. Moreover, he did not originate the evil, 
nor did he consummate it. They started the pro- 
cess and they completed it. He simply fell in with 
the current and was carried along by it. He only 
assented to the undertaking and contributed his 
share to it. 

And who does anything more than this in any of 
life's great enterprises? Look at any accomplished 
result of your life and you will be surprised to find 
how small a part you played in its production. Take 
the discovery of America, perhaps the greatest 
event in its results since the birth of Christ, as an 
example. The honor is ascribed to Christopher 
Columbus, and yet how insignificant a part he 
played when we stop to think about it, among the 
many causes which revealed the new world to the 
old. A long line of causes had been at work in 
different nations thousands of years before he was 
born rendering his voyage possible and preparing 
the world for his discovery; and multitudinous 
forces over which he had no control must follow in 



i 9 o 



THE SIN OF AARON. 



the wake of his discovery to transform a howling 1 
wilderness of savages into the great Republic of 
the west. All previous science and art and civili- 
zation had to bring their contributions and lay 
them at his feet before he could launch forth upon 
the great enterprise. The mariner's compass had 
to be discovered before he could make the voyage. 
Astronomy had to map out the heavens and teach 
him the motions of the heavenly bodies. Mathe- 
matics and navigation must be known in order to 
find his latitude and longitude. All the experimen- 
tal knowledge of practical seamanship — the setting 
of sail, the management of the vessel, the indica- 
tions of the heavens and the signs of the ocean — 
must be foreknown before he can weigh anchor and 
leave port. But before this he must have a vessel, 
and this presupposes a knowledge of shipbuilding 
— an art which takes us back through thousands of 
years to the first hollowed log paddled by man on 
the water. In building a ship, timber must be cut 
and sawed and for this purpose iron and steel must 
be employed. Before the mechanic can practise 
his art, his tools must be made, and the making of 
these will take us back through metallurgy to the 
smelting of the first ore. His vessel must be fitted 
out with ropes and sails, but before this can be 
done men must have learned to use the loom, the 



THE SIN OF AARON. 191 

spindle, the hetchell and the brake. We are thus 
conducted back to the growing of flax in the field, 
and this presupposes a knowledge of agricul- 
ture. The crew with which the vessel was manned 
had a long line of ancestors back of it. All the dis- 
cipline, obedience and respect for authority which 
are the result of long established government and 
which made them patient in trial and subject to 
command, were the growth of all the ages and had 
their root in the first petty government set up 
upon the earth. All science, all art, all civilization 
came and laid their treasures at his feet and he 
simply melted them together and molded them in- 
to form. Not only men but natural laws and forms 
co-operated to make the discovery. The light 
streamed from heaven, magnetism pointed the nee- 
dle, the winds filled the sails and the waters buoyed 
him up. Even after the discovery of America, 
what countless processes and forces were necessary 
to transform it into what it now is. Spain, France, 
Holland and England must successively people and 
govern it. Fierce and bloody Indian wars must be 
carried on. The forests must be felled, the marshes 
drained, the rivers bridged and the lands cultivated. 
Turnpikes, canals, railroads and telegraphs must 
follow. Great cities must be built with their multi- 
plied commercial, political, educational, social and 



192 THE SIN OF AARON. 

charitable institutions. The continent when it first 
broke upon the eye of Columbus was but a crude, 
rough thing that needed the graver's tool upon it 
before it could command the homage of the na- 
tions. A thousand agents and processes preceded 
the discovery and made it possible, and as many 
more succeeded to make the discovery of any value 
or importance to mankind. 

As we contemplate Columbus standing in the 
center of these surging and impatient forces, he 
dwindles to a mere dwarf; the part which he played 
in history was trifling and insignificant compared 
with the splendid results which followed. He said 
if the nations would bring him sufficient gold he 
would find a northwest passage to India. They 
brought it and he could not help making the cru- 
cial test. When the continent once hove in sight, 
all the rest followed without his co-operation or 
consent. He could not see the end. He simply 
linked the past to the future on the shore of a new 
continent and all the rest followed as an irresistible 
consequence. 

What is true in this respect in the great world 
around us, is also true in the world within us. 
Character building, whether good or bad, is the 
result not alone of our isolated effort but as well of 
innumerable agents and influences other than our 



THE SIN OF AARON. 193 

own. We talk of self-made and self-ruined men, 
and yet how small a part of the accomplished fact 
is the direct result of the man's own immediate act. 
Prenatal conditions had something to do in laying 
the foundation of his character. The influences of 
father and mother, sister and brother, home and 
surroundings were moulding him while yet in his 
cradle. During the plastic years of his youth, com- 
panions and associates, education and enployments, 
success and failure were all stamping their impress 
upon him. In after life sickness and health, pov- 
erty and plenty, temptation and opportunity had 
much to do in shaping his course. Like the Israel- 
ites journeying from Egypt to the Promised Land, 
we cannot take the course we would, but must 
bend our steps whither we can go, backward and 
forward, now this way, now that, our journey 
through life is a long and crooked one, made such 
not by our choice but by our environments. The 
man's own voluntary act was only one of many 
causes which shaped his life and moulded his char- 
acter. Look at that miserable drunkard, with 
character wrecked and manhood paralyzed — a son 
of God in ruins — and then ask who made him what 
he is. He did not create the drinking habits of the 
country. He did not make the liquor which he 
drank nor vet discover distillation. He did not 



194 THE SIN OF AARON. 

make the appetite which burns like fire within him. 
He never meant to throw himself away and reach 
the level where he now stands. He did not even 
seek the intoxicating bowl. He found all the con- 
ditions of his ruin made ready to his hand. There 
were appetite within and temptation without urg- 
ing him to yield. Others brought the cup to him 
and he simply cast it into the fire, or rather cast 
the fire into himself and there came out this calf. 
He never counted upon or consented to, this re- 
sult when he yielded to temptation and took the 
first glass. Having taken the first step in ruin, in- 
flamed appetite, the force of habit, social influences 
and public opinion all put the graver's tool upon 
him and carved him into what we now find him. 

John Bardsley did not make himself city treas- 
urer, nor organize the Keystone Bank. He did 
not extort the money from the people, nor was he 
responsible for the failure of the bank. The bank 
offered him interest on the people's money and he 
simply deposited it for his own benefit. The in- 
vestigation, the trial, the conviction and the im- 
prisonment which followed were all carried on 
without his co-operation or consent. It is only 
another illustration of the principle under consid- 
eration : The people brought their gold to him and 
he cast it into the fire and there came out this calf, 



THE SIN OF AARON. 195 

The falsehood of the passage lies in its assuming 
that a man is excusable for wrong doing because 
he was the victim of circumstances and that at 
most he is responsible for results only in propor- 
tion to the part which he played in bringing them 
about. Substantially it is the same excuse as that 
offered by the first sinners of our race. They said, 
"The woman that thou gavest me, she gave me of 
the tree and I did eat, and The serpent beguiled 
me and I did eat." Aaron's statement is false be- 
cause it does not give the whole truth. He omits 
to mention that he commanded the people to bring 
their gold to him for the purpose of casting a god. 
He suppresses the fact that the mould was made 
to his order and that the engravers were instructed 
how to adorn the image. The gold did not acci- 
dentally come out of the fire in the shape of a calf. 
The Israelites had just left Egypt where they had 
witnessed the worship of the bull Apis, and Aaron 
therefore well knew what form the god should take 
in order to be acceptable to the people. His 
hands, it is true, did not mould nor engrave it, but 
his head did both. Moreover he caused an altar 
to be erected and proclaimed a feast for the pur- 
pose of worshiping this idol. One would sup- 
pose from reading his excuse, that he had been the 

53 



i 9 6 THE SIN OF AARON. 

innocent victim of circumstances. His language 
implies that he had simply cast the gold into the 
fire without knowing that it would, and without 
intending that it should, come out a god. He only 
pulled the trigger not knowing the gun was loaded. 
It is astonishing how history repeats itself. In 
nine cases out of ten of wrong doing men offer the 
same excuse. The affected innocence of criminals 
everywhere is simply refreshing. What they did 
was a very little thing, they were almost forced to 
do it by circumstances and did not know the con- 
sequences which would result. The truth is they 
did more than they admit and were not as ignor- 
ant and consequently not as innocent as they pre- 
tend. The president of a bank passes his own 
note and has it discounted in his own bank and 
thus becomes borrower and lender at one and the 
same time. The result is that the money thus bor- 
rowed is sunk in speculation, the bank breaks and 
hundreds of depositors lose their hard-earned sav- 
ings. When arrested and brought face to face with 
the ruin which he has wrought, very commonly he 
affects innocence and poses as a victim of circum- 
stances. All he did was to pass his own note, oth- 
ers were guilty of inducing him to invest in the 
speculation and he did not know that what he did 
would result in widespread loss and ruin to oth- 



THE SIN OF AARON. 197 

ers. He affects to be genuinely sorry for the one 
misstep which he made, but claims to have been 
innocent in intention and does not want to be held 
responsible for all the evil which has followed. To 
me there is something perfectly nauseating in hear- 
ing a man of commanding ability and influence 
thus plead the baby act to excuse his guilt. As in 
Aaron's case, so in every case since then, the of- 
fender did more and knew more than he admits. 
The bank president did more than pass his own 
note. He drew it up and signed it. He presented 
it and drew the money for it. He concealed the 
transaction from the board of directors and acted 
a falsehood to deceive everybody until the expos- 
ure came. He was not so ignorant of conse- 
quences as he affects, moreover. Of course he did 
not certainly foreknow how his speculation would 
turn out, or he would not have embarked in it. But 
he did know that there was great risk and that if 
he lost, all the rest would follow. He did know 
that he was jeopardizing other people's money and 
that when he cast it into the fire there might come 
out nothing more than a calf. A man's acts may 
be either direct or indirect, mediate or immediate, 
and his knowledge may be either certain or pro- 
bable, positive or inferential. A man can act with- 
out using his hands and see without using his eyes. 



198 THE SIN OF AARON. 

What he does by an agent, he does himself, and 
what he sees mentally and inferentially is just as 
much knowledge as if he had sensible evidences 
of it. Moreover a man is responsible for what he 
did not do and did not know if such inaction and 
ignorance are the result of his indifference to or 
acquiescence in the consequences which follow. 
The man who does nothing but quietly stands by 
and witnesses a murder becomes particeps criminis 
because he did not interfere, and the man who 
turns the draw of a railroad bridge off and does 
not know that a train is approaching when he 
might know the fact by looking is as guilty as if he 
saw the great headlight of the engine blazing 
around the curve. A man is responsible for not 
knowing when he might have known and guilty 
for acting without knowledge. 

But Aaron claimed to be the victim of circum- 
stances. Well, what criminal is not in some meas- 
ure the victim of circumstances? Few men com- 
mit sin or crime simply from the love of evil. There 
is always the hope of gain or the fear of loss impell- 
ing them to action. Then there is example and 
influence, temptation and opportunity all singing a 
siren song to lure him on. A man who consents 
to be governed by circumstances will be their vic- 
tim all the time. God made man to be the lord 



THE SIN OF AARON. 199 

of creation — not its slave. His commission was to 
subdue and keep the earth, not to be subdued by 
it. His business is to seize upon opportunities 
and victimize circumstances — not to be victimized 
by them. There is no virtue in doing the right 
when there is no temptation to do wrong. The 
glory of our manhood is that it can rise superior 
to circumstances and defy them all. He only 
measures up to duty who, taking his stand in the 
center of adverse circumstances, conquers and con- 
trols them in the interest of right. Aaron yielded 
to evil because, he said, ."the people were set on 
mischief." Luther at the Diet of Worms with all 
Christendom in arms against him and with a mar- 
tyr's death threatening him, boldly looked his ene- 
mies in the eye and refused to recant, exclaiming, 
"Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise, God help 
me." A man with God's help is more than a 
match for any circumstances and he who surren- 
ders to them must bear the consequences of his 
cowardice and defeat. 

But finally the great fallacy of Aaron's excuse lies 
in the assumption that his responsibility is to be 
measured by the size of the act which he had com- 
mitted. His casuistry is all quantitative and ig- 
nores the qualitative altogether, as if an equal 
amount of responsibility attached to the same act 



200 THE SIN OF AARON. 

whenever, wherever and by whomsoever commit- 
ted. But who does not know that this is false in 
toto ! A few years ago the entrance to New York 
harbor from Long Island Sound was obstructed 
by submarine rocks. The danger of a passage at 
this place was so great that it was named Hell 
Gate. To remove these rocks men were at work 
for years under water drilling and boring. At last 
the rocks were honeycombed with chambers and 
a dynamite cartridge was placed in each chamber. 
These were all connected with wires, and the wires 
conducted to an office in New York city. Here 
an electric battery was charged and was ready to 
send its current along the wires the moment it 
should be connected. There was a little electric 
button there which a man might have played upon 
as upon the keys of a piano, for hours at any time 
before, without any responsibility. But now all 
things are made ready and a man simply touched 
that button with his finger and quick as thought 
an explosion followed which shook all New York 
and opened a channel through Hell Gate twenty- 
four feet deep. The touching of the button was 
a little act, but that little act was of vast conse- 
quence. It was the same act which had been per- 
formed a thousand times before, but the responsi- 
bility attaching to it now was a thousand times 



THE SIN OF AARON. 201 

greater than ever before. Responsibility is to be 
measured not by the size of the act, but by the legi- 
timate results of that act. 

Take another illustration. There stands a rail- 
road train filled with passengers and with steam up, 
but the engineer and fireman have not yet boarded 
the engine. Suppose an ignorant man shall now 
board the engine and pull out the throttle valve. 
Away goes the train with breakneck speed and he 
cannot stop it, until at last it jumps the track and 
is piled in heaps of ruin with scores of dead and 
mutilated passengers beneath it. Do you tell me 
that the man's responsibility is to be measured by 
the size of his act? Why, he did nothing but pull 
out the throttle valve — a trifling thing considered 
in itself. Who does not know that the ghost of 
every injured passenger will shake its gory locks 
at him and that, not his act but the consequences 
of that act, will confront him in judgment? Nor 
will his ignorance or the force of circumstances 
serve to mitigate his crime. He had no business 
to meddle with that engine if he did not know the 
effect of pulling out the throttle valve. Men may 
have urged him or even bribed him to do it, but 
while this fact inculpates them it does not excul- 
pate him. He has no right to become the tool of 
other people or to be bought and sold by them. 



202 THE SIN OF AARON. 

Despite all the excuses which he can offer, both 
God and men will hold him accountable not for the 
pulling out of the throttle valve only but for the 
wreck of the train. 

Brothers, in the light of our responsibility, how 
solemn does all life become! This universe in 
which we live is one vast engine with batteries of 
power pulsating and throbbing and hissing all 
around us. There are whole trains of consequences 
involving the lives and characters of many human 
beings coupled to these forces. A single act or 
word of ours may set a train moving, which we 
cannot stop, until it ends in ruin and disaster. The 
act may be a small one, but if it set in motion 
mighty forces, the responsibility will not be small. 
Where immortal interests are at stake and where 
fatal forces are caged all around us, it does not do 
to trifle with valves and springs and levers which 
may unchain these forces in an instant. We have 
no right to carelessly handle machinery of whose 
uses and pent up forces we are ignorant and we 
have no right to be ignorant of the world in which 
we live and move. What others may have done to- 
ward contributing to the evil will not relieve us of 
responsibility. Men and devils may tempt but can- 
not force us to do wrong. If therefore we yield to 
temptation and fail to weigh well the consequences 



THE SIN OF AARON. 203 

of what we are doing, we must expect to have the 
whole evil charged home upon us and to be called 
to account for it. If we cast the gold into the fire, 
the calf which comes out will take shelter in our 
door. 



Lot's Choice. 



LOT'S CHOICE. 



I^ot dwelled in the cities of the plain, and pitched his tent toward 
Sodom.— Genesis XIII : 12. 



Separated from their context these words would 
mean but little. They simply express a fact which 
transpired many thousands of miles from here and 
several thousands of years ago. But taken in con- 
nection with preceding and subsequent history this 
passage is big with moral import and will give 
birth to several valuable lessons for our instruction. 

Lot was nephew to Abraham. When the Lord 
said to Abram "Get thee out of thy country and 
from thy kindred and from thy father's house unto 
a land that I will show thee," as Abram departed 
from Haran to obey the command, the record says 
"Lot went with him." When, in consequence of 
a famine in the land of Canaan Abraham went 
down to Egypt, again Lot went with him. When 
the famine was over and Abraham went back into 
Canaan we read again, "Lot went with him." Not 
only did he accompany the patriarch in person, 
but his fortunes thus far seem to have kept pace 
with Abraham's successes. When we read "Abram 
was very rich in cattle, in silver and in gold" we 

207 



208 LOT'S CHOICE. 

have only to run our eyes a few verses further on 
and we come to the passage, "And Lot also which 
went with Abram had flocks and herds and tents." 
Thus far they had dwelt together and worked to- 
gether and prospered together. Up to this time 
in all probability Lot had been under the care of 
his uncle and had been guided by his counsels and 
example. But a time came at last when separa- 
tion became necessary and Lot was compelled to 
exercise his own judgment and choose for himself. 
Arrived at Bethel upon their return from Egypt 
it soon became apparent that the country there was 
too limited to accommodate both of them with 
their immense flocks and herds. Disputes arose be- 
tween the herdsmen of Abram's cattle and the 
herdsmen of Lot's cattle, which resulted in open 
strife. There was danger that the masters, espous- 
ing the cause of their servants, might become em- 
bittered towards each other and their friendship 
be turned into hate. Abram, with the prudence 
for which he is noted, proposed that, in order to 
avoid difficulty, they should divide the land be- 
tween them and separate, saying to Lot: "Let 
there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee 
and between my herdsmen and thy herdsmen; for 
we be brethren. Is not the whole land before thee? 
Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me ; if thou wilt 



LOT'S CHOICE. 209 

take the left hand then I will go to the right ; or if 
thou depart to the right hand then I will go to the 
left." 

It would have been but modest to say the least 
for Lot, who was the younger and who owed all 
that he had to his uncle's kindness and care, to 
have given the patriarch the first choice and to 
have been satisfied to take as his portion the land 
that was left. But with inexcusable selfishness he 
set about to get the better of his uncle in the divi- 
sion. The record says "Lot lifted up his eyes and 
beheld all the plain of Jordan that it was well 
watered everywhere . . . even as the garden of 
the Lord, like the land of Egypt. Then Lot chose 
him all the plain of Jordan and Lot journeyed 
East." Then follows the text. Having chosen 
his portion and separated from Abraham he went 
and "dwelled in the cities of the plain and pitched 
his tent toward Sodom." 

The passage thus connected gives us Lot's 
Choice as a theme for consideration. We are not 
prepared to judge of the wisdom or folly of his 
choice until we know the considerations which led 
to it and what was involved in it. The history 
more than intimates that the only consideration 
which decided him to go to the East was temporal 
advantage. The valley of the Jordan was well 



2io LOT'S CHOICE. 

watered and was therefore rich in pasture lands. 
Here his flocks and herds might roam in green 
pastures and he revel in abundance. Perhaps he 
called to mind the famine which had driven him 
and his uncle into Egypt and calculated that in 
time of drought these well watered bottom lands 
of the Jordan would be the last to fail in yielding a 
harvest. There was no little shrewdness displayed 
in his selection and doubtless he prided himself 
upon his prudence and forethought. Abram had 
given him the first choice, and taking advantage 
of the patriarch's generosity he had taken the lion's 
share. There the plain lay before him, green and 
flowery and well watered even as the garden of the 
Lord. The choice had been given him and why 
should he not choose that which promised greatest 
advantage? 

There were other considerations which ought to 
have made him hesitate long in this selection, but 
he seems to have speedily disposed of them. A 
man would naturally ask what about the healthful- 
ness and inhabitants of the country to which he 
was going? A western prairie may be rich as the 
garden of the Lord, but if it breed fever and ague 
and its only inhabitants are wild Indians, a man 
would be slow to select it as his home. A tract of 
land may be well watered and fertile, but it may lie 



LOT'S CHOICE. 211 

at the foot of a slumbering valcano or it may be 
in a district that is rocked occasionally by earth- 
quakes. It may be a beautiful valley, but it may 
be a highway over which armies pass in times of 
war, or the battlefield of surrounding tribes, or it 
may lie open exposed to the incursions of freeboot- 
ers and banditti. A man can easily overreach him- 
self in trying to get the better of another. Avarice 
not infrequently blinds a man to his true interests. 
When we are so intent upon any one thing we lose 
sight of a great many other important things. 

Lot seems to have set his heart upon wealth and 
in his eagerness to secure it he lost sight of a num- 
ber of things quite as important to his happiness. 
The truth was, as the sequel proved, that the plain 
of the Jordan was naturally defenceless against the 
incursions of an enemy. A time soon came when 
Chedorlaomer, with three confederate kings, de- 
scended into the vale of Siddim and gave battle to 
the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah with their allies, 
and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled and fell 
there, while their broken and scattered forces took 
refuge in the mountains. And in the spoliation of 
the country which followed the defeat we are told 
that the victors "took Lot, Abram's brother's son, 
who dwelt in Sodom, and his goods and departed." 

14 



212 LOT'S CHOICE. 

The valley of Jordan was a beautiful plain, but Lot, 
with all his goods, was carried captive away from it. 
Abraham, hearing the news of his nephew's cap- 
ture, threw himself at the head of his servants, 
pursued and overtook the bandit king, and in the 
battle which followed defeated him and retook Lot 
with all his goods, and restored him to his posses- 
sions. Peace having thus been restored Lot once 
more dwelt in security upon his wide spreading 
lands. 

There was another consideration which ought 
to have weighed upon Lot's mind more heavily 
than even the danger of robbery and war in de- 
ciding the selection of his dwelling place, and that 
was the moral character of the people with whom 
he was to associate. The value of a property de- 
pends very largely upon the neighborhood in 
which it is located. One of the most substantial 
testimonies which the world bears to the value of 
Christianity is in the estimate which it places upon 
Christian society and Christian institutions. Look 
over the morning papers and read the advertise- 
ments of properties for sale and you will find that 
after describing the premises, it is carefully added 
that the property is within a short distance of 
churches and schools and in the midst of a Chris- 
tian neighborhood. The man who has any regard 



LOT'S CHOICE. 213 

for his own morals or any concern about the char- 
acter of his children will take into account the peo- 
ple among whom he is to dwell more than the 
land which he is to cultivate. This consideration 
was present to the mind of Lot when he made his 
choice and had to be taken into account. There 
lay the valley of the Jordan, well watered and beau- 
tiful, but over there was Sodom and the cities of 
the plain. The two were inseparable. If he chose 
the plain he had to associate with the people. Com- 
mon decency forbids me to attempt a description 
of the character of the Sodomites. Their unmen- 
tionable vices and crimes had turned their city into 
a festering plague spot on the face of the earth. 
It is doubtful whether the people of any city either 
ancient or modern ever descended to greater 
depths of vileness than the inhabitants of this city 
on the banks of the Jordan. It was not simply the 
rabble of lewd fellows that had brought disgrace 
upon the city by their vices ; the whole population 
seem to have been infected by the moral contagion. 
The angel of God promised Abraham that the city 
should not be destroyed if ten righteous persons 
could be found in it, but the ten could not be found. 
Society was rotten to the core, and there was no 
sound spot in it. It often happens that disease 
fastens upon the fairest form, and so this most cor- 



2i 4 LOT'S CHOICE. 

rupt of all cities lay festering and reeking in the 
midst of the fertile and well-watered plains of the 
Jordan. 

Lot could not but have taken in the whole situa- 
tion when he made his choice. The character of 
the city was notorious, and the facts were patent 
to all. If he went to the east he secured magnifi- 
cent pasture lands — wealth and ease and luxury 
were there, but moral death was there also. 

He could amass a fortune there and leave a rich 
legacy of houses and lands and herds to his chil- 
dren, but in doing it he would. have to subject them 
to the fearful ordeal of growing up and forming 
their character amid vice and licentiousness un- 
parallelled. The text plainly shows that he saw 
the danger but made his choice on the side of tem- 
poral gain, in the face of it. Perhaps he would 
not like to have stated it thus, but the meaning of 
his choice under the circumstances is that he 
thought more of his flocks and herds than he did 
of his children. The statement in the text that 
"he pitched his tent toward Sodom" is very sug- 
gestive. Why did he not go to Sodom and dwell 
there as he afterward did? I think the answer is 
apparent to every one. Knowing the character of 
the people and the danger to the morals of his fam- 
ily, he did not at first even mean to go there. He 



LOT'S CHOICE. 215 

started in that direction, but he did not mean to 
go all the way to Sodom. He had to go toward it 
if he took the well watered valley lands, but he in- 
tended to stop half-way and dwell in some of the 
cities of the plain whose morals were bad enough, 
it is true, but still nothing like as bad as those of 
Sodom. He saw the danger, but thought he could 
avoid it. He fancied he could walk amid the fire 
and not be burned. For the sake of worldly ad- 
vantage he deliberately decided to take the risk of 
corrupting the morals and damning the souls of 
himself and his family, vainly imagining that not- 
withstanding everybody else had yielded to its in- 
fluence, he could dwell amid corruption and not be 
infected by it. He might about as well have en- 
tered the maelstrom and circled around it a few 
times without intending to go down in its awful 
vortex as to have pitched his tent toward Sodom 
without expecting to dwell there at last. The se- 
cret of it all was, he looked more at gain than at 
godliness in his choice and the god of this world 
blinded his eyes so that in his selection he failed to 
secure the worldly advantage which he sought and 
well nigh destroyed himself and his whole family, 
both body and soul. His subsequent history re- 
veals in glaring colors the rashness and folly of his 
choice. He sought worldly advantage and before 



216 LOT'S CHOICE. 

he knew it he and all his goods were captured in 
war and only the strong arm of Abram, whom he 
had sought to overreach, restored him to his home 
and possessions. He meant to stop short of Sodom 
and preserve both his morals and religion, but it 
was not long before he was dwelling within the 
walls of Sodom, and when the lewd rabble sur- 
rounded his house and demanded possession of his 
angel guests, he offered to hand over his two 
daughters instead, and afterward himself prosti- 
tuted them both in a drunken debauch. Nor were 
their morals any better than his, for in their final 
shame they were more to blame than he. He 
chose the well-watered plain because of its material 
wealth despite the moral corruption of its society, 
and at last, when heaven's fire and brimstone de- 
scended to disinfect this plague spot, his property, 
his wife and most of his children perished in the 
common ruin, while he and his two daughters alone 
escaped to perpetuate the licentiousness of the 
place. 

Lot ignored the value of morals and religion in 
the choice which he made, and God set his blood- 
red seal of wrath upon his worldly mindedness. 
Sacred history is heaven's monition speaking from 
the graves of the past to the living of to-day. The 
time and the place may be far away, but men are 



LOT'S CHOICE. 217 

essentially the same everywhere and always, and 
God and his laws are the same yesterday, to-day 
and forever. 

A time comes in every man's life when he must 
make choice for himself. A father's, a mother's, 
or a guardian's care cannot go with us all through 
life. Sooner or later we must bid adieu to their 
guidance, exercise our own judgment and strike 
out a course for ourselves. That hour, whenever 
it comes, is one burdened with eternal issues. We 
little dream then as we stand balanced and hesi- 
tating between the various courses before us, now 
inclining to this side and then to that, what an eter- 
nity of joy or sorrow depends upon the choice. On 
the crest of the water shed which separates the 
great northern basin of our country from the 
southern, there is a line where every rain drop as 
it falls upon the gound, will pause, quiver and rock 
back and forth apparently unable to decide wheth- 
er it shall flow down the declivity on the north, or 
whether it shall join the waters which roll south- 
ward. A single hair or the gentlest puff of wind 
is sufficient to turn the scales and decide its des- 
tiny. Where the attractions are so nearly bal- 
anced one would think it a matter of indifference 
which side won. But the decision upon that 
doubtful line away up in the mountains will deter- 



218 LOT'S CHOICE. 

mine whether the rain drop shall at last mingle 
with the blue waters of the lakes or whether it shall 
roll down and be lost in the Gulf. Every young 
man and young woman, too, who is halting be- 
tween two opinions in regard to the future course 
of his or her life, is standing upon that line now, 
and upon the choice which they make will depend 
whether they shall hereafter walk in robes of white 
or be covered with the blackness of darkness for- 
ever. 

As in the case of Lot, so now "the land is be- 
fore us," and we can go either to the right hand 
or to the left, and as with him, so still with us, the 
choice will be between gain and godliness, property 
and purity, pleasure and piety. On the one side 
are devout worship, rugged virtue and security; 
on the other is a well-watered plain, green and 
flowery, which promises pleasure and plenty, but 
there is a Sodom in the midst of it. The choice 
in the last analysis is reduced to this: Shall I aim 
at worldly success first and make morals and re- 
ligion secondary, or shall I hold religion and moral 
character as paramount and make worldly pros- 
perity subordinate and subservient? Shall I seek 
my pleasure and secure my fortune first and then 
turn my attention to religion, or shall I bow first 
at the foot of the cross and seek my enjoyment 



LOT'S CHOICE. 219 

and fortune in the service of God? The question 
thus fairly and squarely put has been authortatively 
answered by the Lord Jesus Christ himself : "Seek 
ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, 
and all these things shall be added unto you." 
Don't make the mistake of supposing that you 
can shut God out of your calculations and succeed. 
A worldly life promises much, I know, but it never 
pays half it promises. A man may get the well- 
watered plain in defiance of religion ; he may tram- 
ple God's law under his feet and succeed in amass- 
ing a fortune or climbing to a lofty seat of power, 
but sooner or later the spoiler will come and filch 
it away, or heaven's fire will descend and consume 
it. "Boss" Tweed set both the laws of God and 
man at defiance and made power and wealth the 
goal of life's race, and he succeeded beyond his 
most sanguine expectations. But a time came at 
last when truth and justice vindicated themselves 
and when he, stripped of his property, friendless 
and powerless, died in a convict's cell. God's law 
is no less certain to visit punishment upon the sin- 
ner than are the statutes of men to punish the crim- 
inal. Let a man engage in the liquor traffic and 
deal out liquid death by the gill to his neighbor — 
he has a license and is not, therefore, liable to any 
legal penalties — he may amass a fortune, live in 



220 LOT'S CHOICE. 

ease and plenty, but if his children turn out gutter 
drunkards, as they probably will, his success is a 
bitter failure. The destruction of Lot's house by 
fire and brimstone was a lighter curse than the 
fiend of delirium tremens which is destroying so 
many homes to-day. 

But the text suggests a greater danger in the 
choice which we make than any I have thus far in- 
dicated. Lot never meant to go to Sodom, he 
only pitched his tent toward it. He deluded him- 
self with the idea that for the sake of temporal ad- 
vantage he might tread on questionable ground 
without serious loss. He meant to preserve his 
purity and that of his family while yet he associated 
with the vile. He intended to stop half-way and 
dwell in one of the cities of the plain, and little 
dreamed that if Sodom were destroyed he would 
be involved in its ruin. In a word he meant to 
trade and mingle with the Sodomites but never to 
become like them. How, then, did he get into 
Sodom, and how did he and his family become so 
corrupt? We do not know, and it is doubtful 
whether he ever knew how. Having pitched his 
tent toward the place he found it easier to go on 
than to stop; and when the final overthrow came 
he dwelt within its walls. This fatal delusion is the 
soft and glossy spider's web which is luring so 



LOT'S CHOICE. 221 

many to ruin and death. The destroyer keeps him- 
self hidden until you are once in his meshes, then 
he makes his appearance, only to grin at your 
struggles to escape, while he every moment binds 
you tighter and tighter in his toils. There is not 
one man in ten thousand who ever intends to be- 
come a drunkard. They begin with the social 
glass and intend to stop half-way with the moder- 
ate drinking. Point then, to the bloated drunkard 
wallowing in the street or reeling to his miserable 
home to curse and beat his broken-hearted wife 
and innocent children, and they would exclaim in 
horror: "Is thy servant a dog that he should do 
this thing?" They forget that their tent is pitched 
toward just that thing, and that the vilest sot start- 
ed where they started, and traveled over the same 
road which they now tread. Will they stop half- 
way? In three cases out of four they will go 
straight down to Sodom, if they do not die on the 
road, and when arrived they will wonder how they 
got there. 

The cashier of a bank or the custodian of a trust 
fund would scoff at the suggestion that he could 
ever steal or rob. He begins with using moneys 
which are lying idle in his hands, pledging himself 
to make good all he thus borrows. But soon he 
embarks in larger speculations where, in case of 



222 LOT'S CHOICE. 

failure he could not make good the funds thus 
risked. Still he does not mean to go far in that 
direction — he will make just one more venture and 
then stop. Will he do it? Why then are there so 
many men who once held these trusts in our peni- 
tentiaries to-day, and so many more who ought to 
be there, for embezzlement? 

I suppose that the men who go to Congress and 
the Legislatures are made out of the same stuff as 
those who stay at home. I am charitable enough 
to believe that few of them ever mean at the start 
to accept a bribe or to barter away the interests of 
the people to secure their own personal ends. But 
the moment the politician winks at the fraud which 
secures his nomination that moment he pitches his 
tent toward Sodom, and step by step he will trav- 
el downward in the majority of cases until at last 
his vote is in the open market for sale to the high- 
est bidder, and his only politics is plunder. 

Let a man start in business and begin by prac- 
ticing the tricks of trade — misrepresenting his 
goods and taking advantage of the ignorance or 
confidence of a customer. He only means to be 
a sharp business man, but in nine cases out of ten 
he will end a liar and a rogue, if indeed, he be not 
both at the start. It is easy to run on a down grade 
and very hard to stop. Safety lies in never start- 



LOT'S CHOICE. 223 

ing on that track. Don't pitch your tent toward 
Sodom, neither dwell in all the plain. Corruption 
and death are there and hereafter fire and brim- 
stone will be there. The greatest danger 
of our age lies in the disposition to tamper with 
evil for the sake of pecuniary advantage under the 
fatal delusion that we can mingle with wicked peo- 
ple and indulge in a little wickedness ourselves 
without being corrupted by the one or made cap- 
tive by the other. Be assured that glossy tempter 
has a serpent's fang. 

"Vice is a monster of such frightful mien 
That to be hated needs but to be seen, 
But seen too oft' familiar with her face 
We first endure, then pity, then embrace." 
Since a choice in life must be made, and since 
our eternal destiny depends upon that choice, let 
us beware that we are not deceived and led astray. 
No matter how promising the portion, if you must 
take it at the sacrifice of moral or religious princi- 
ples you buy it too dear. If a man has to coun- 
tenance corruption and associate on friendly terms 
with the vicious in order to succeed, he had bet- 
ter never succeed in life. Such a course is the 
sacrificing all that is worth living for in order to 
have a pompous funeral. Don't dream for a mo- 
ment that you can start in the path of evil and stop 



224 LOT'S CHOICE. 

when you please, or rather, don't imagine that hav- 
ing once started, it will ever be your pleasure to 
stop. If you once pitch your tent toward Sodom 
and consent to dwell in one of the cities of the plain 
ten chances to one you will never stop until you 
reach the city of destruction. Would you be se- 
cure, turn your face in the other direction. "Es- 
cape for thy life, look not behind thee, neither stay 
thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain lest 
thou be consumed." 



The Restoring of the Withered 
Hand. 



THE RESTORING OF THE WITHERED 
HAND. 



A great multitude, when they had heard what great things he did, came 
unto him.— Mark III : 8. 



Here was a startling miracle wrought by the ut- 
terance of a single sentence from the lips of Christ. 
A man with a withered hand heard Jesus say 
"stretch forth thy hand" and the next instant found 
himself perfectly cured. It required no effort on 
the part of Christ. He simply "spake and it was 
done; He commanded and it stood fast." It re- 
quired no loss of time to work the cure. The man 
with the withered hand never knew when he was 
healed. He only knew that when he came to 
Christ his arm was powerless and that when in 
obedience to Christ's command he tried to stretch 
it forth it was well. Silently, secretly, instantan- 
eously the work was done, no man knew when or 
how. Miracles were easy to Christ. He appeared 
more at home in the realm of the miraculous than 
in the natural world. In the natural, ends are 
reached only through means. Space must be 
bridged by connecting media and processes re- 
quiring time must be employed. Above the nat- 
15 227 



228 THE RESTORING OF 

ural, Jesus could annihilate both time and space, 
and, dispensing with all processes and means, could 
bring His own almighty power to bear directly 
where He would. 

Now, since it was so easy for Him to perform 
miracles the fact that He wrought comparatively 
few miraculous cures is proof conclusive that the 
healing of the sick was not the chief reason for dis- 
playing His almighty power. He could have 
brought the dead back to life, but He raised only a 
very few and these were resurrected only tempor- 
arily, for they all afterward died again and de- 
scended to the grave — the common receptacle of 
the race. He could have healed every leper 
and cured every sick person on the globe not only 
then but throughout all time. But He healed at 
most only a few thousand and their cures were 
only temporary — they were all subject to the 
same diseases afterward as they had been before 
and in a few years they all sickened and died as 
though no divine interposition had ever taken 
place in their cases. The great end of His mission 
was evidently not to save the bodies of men from 
disease and death. Sin has so warped, disturbed 
and dwarfed these clay tenements that they are un- 
fit to be the home of the soul or to become the 
temple of the Holy Ghost. Christ never meant by 



THE WITHERED HAND. 229 

arresting disease and paralyzing death to make us 
immortal on the earth and thus consign us to an 
everlasting abode in these tabernacles of flesh all 
wrecked and shattered as they are by the fall. His 
plan is not to patch up the old wreck, but to let 
sickness and death pull it entirely down and take 
it all apart and afterward from its scattered dust to 
rebuild it in all its original grandeur, a fit home 
for the soul and a temple of the Holy Ghost. The 
resurrection of the body to a life where "sickness, 
sorrow, pain and death are felt and feared no 
more" is the final, crowning work of Christ's great 
mission, but it is yet in the future and when it 
takes place we will bid adieu to this sin-cursed 
earth and our feet will tread upon the blossoms of 
a greener, brighter shore. Not here and now does 
Christ propose to restore our withered hands, but 
in the last great day when the battle is over and 
the victory won — when the palms are to be dis- 
tributed to the conquerors, then He will give us 
hands that are able to wave them. God means to 
make death complete the work which it has begun. 
Like a corrosive in human nature He means to 
make it rust itself out and then in the fires of a 
world in flames He will smelt the material anew 
and run it in a perfect mould "without spot or 



230 THE RESTORING OF 

wrinkle or any such thing." "The last enemy that 
shall be destroyed is death." 

Christ's great work upon our earth was to de- 
stroy the power of the devil over human souls and 
restamp them with the image of God. Not only 
has the dwelling place been shattered by sin but 
its immortal occupant is palsied and helpless with- 
in. The body can wait until the resurrection morn- 
ing to be rebuilt, but the soul must have help at 
once or it will perish. Jesus came to a world of 
dying souls and cried, "I am come that ye might 
have life and that ye might have it more abundant- 
ly." Here he cut short the work of sin and death 
by a new creation and started the soul upon a new 
career by imparting to it a new life. "As many as 
received Him to them gave He power to become 
the sons of God, even to them which believe on 
His name ; which were born not of blood nor of the 
will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God." 

In our shortsightedness means are often mis- 
taken for ends, and appearances are supposed to 
be realities. We look on and see Jesus feed the 
hungry, heal the sick and raise the dead and with- 
out inquiring further we call Him the great physi- 
cian and imagine that the end of His incarnate ex- 
istence was to satisfy our physical wants and cure 
our bodily diseases. As well might we suppose 



THE WITHERED HAND. 231 

the telegraph operator as he sits tapping the but- 
ton before him to be simply thrumming a tune for 
his amusement. He is sending a message to a 
distant man and what we see and hear him doing 
are only appearances and fall infinitely short of the 
reality. Could we but look for a moment to the 
other end of the line and read the message there 
we would see that the end was infinitely above the 
means employed and would lose sight altogether 
of the operator fingering the key of his instru- 
ment. The revelator had seen Jesus at work upon 
human nature here touching the eyes of the blind, 
unstopping the ears of the deaf and taking the 
hand of the dead and then in apocalyptic vision he 
was taken to the other end of life's line and was 
given to see that physical cures were only the 
means of purifying immortal souls and making 
them meet for the inheritance of the saints in light. 
Jesus was touching the keys of sense only to send 
his message to the man within. The great multi- 
tude which no man could number, clad in white 
and with palms in their hands were singing and 
shouting, John tells us, the praises of the Lamb. 
But in all their matchless doxologies they do not 
so much as mention the feeding of the hungry or 
the healing of the sick or the raising of the dead. 
They utterly lose sight of what Jesus did for their 



232 THE RESTORING OF 

bodies in rapturous thanksgiving for the salvation 
of their souls. As they gaze upon the Lamb they 
forget the Physician and think only of the Savior 
and in one bursting chorus shout "Unto Him that 
hath loved us and washed us from our sins in His 
own blood and hath made us kings and priests 
unto God and His Father, to Him be glory and 
dominion both now and forever, Amen." 

Well, if the great end of Christ's mission was to 
save souls, and if in God's great plan of redemp- 
tion the cure of diseases is of comparative insig- 
nificance, then why did Jesus cure any diseases? 
Why should He step aside from the great work of 
saving souls to open a blind man's eyes or cure a 
leper or raise a dead man? Especially pertinent 
does this question become when we remember 
that his cures were not permanent, but only tem- 
porary. Since men were not taken by Him from 
under the dominion of disease and death, why did 
He suspend for a brief season the action of nature's 
laws in a few exceptional cases? The whole dif- 
ficulty in our minds resolves itself into this one 
question: If His work was peculiarly one in the 
realm of spirit, then why did He so often give us 
exhibitions of His miraculous power in the mater- 
ial world? 



THE WITHERED HAND. 233 

There must be some connection and relation be- 
tween the physical and the spiritual to explain 
Christ's alternating between them in His work. 
Such a connection and relation are nowhere stated 
in the Scriptures, but they are everywhere implied 
and assumed. When Jesus asked "whether is eas- 
ier to say thy sins be forgiven thee or to say arise, 
take up thy bed and walk," He plainly implied that 
the pardon of sins and the healing of disease sus- 
tained some relation to each other, otherwise no 
comparison could be instituted between them. 
Again when in the sermon on the mount the Mas- 
ter called attention to the manner in which God 
provided for the birds of the air prefacing His re- 
marks by the question, "is not the life more than 
meat and the body than raiment?" and concluding 
by asking "are ye not much better than they?" it 
is assumed that the animal life of the bird and the 
spiritual life of man stand so related to each other 
that we can reason from what God does in the one 
case to what He will do in the other. This assump- 
tion of a truth is the strongest possible mode of 
declaring it. It implies that the truth is so patent 
that it needs no statement and that it is so evident 
that none will dispute it. People then believed 
and they now believe, that if God takes care of 
flowers and birds He will also take care of men — 



234 THE RESTORING OF 

that He who will cure the bodies of men will also 
save their souls — in a word that the God of nature 
is also the God of grace. But few perhaps have 
ever asked by what logic this universal conclusion 
was reached. Beneath the reasoning which forces 
this belief lies the assumption that the world of 
matter and of spirit are so related that from the 
same cause we may expect similar results in both 
realms. 

When, however, we begin to think upon the 
subject, the chasm between matter and spirit 
becomes so broad and deep that we can scarecly 
conceive of a bridge across it upon which to pass 
from the one realm to the other. Matter is inert, 
unconscious, without responsibility. Spirit, on 
the contrary, is essentially active, conscious, self- 
determining. Its one great law is the law of right 
and its every act is either in obedience to or in 
violation of that law. It is a responsible intelli- 
gence while matter is a dead existence. There is 
not a single property in common between them. 
Matter has bulk, shape, weight, hardness, color, 
taste, smell, sound ; but who could conceive of any 
such properties belonging to spirit? The very 
suggestion that the properties of the one could be 
transferred to the other shocks the mind as some- 
thing monstrous and preposterous. It is just here 



THE WITHERED HAND. 235 

that the materialistic science of to-day breaks 
down and confesses its inability to bridge the 
chasm between matter and spirit. The scientists 
can prove that thought is accompanied by chemi- 
cal changes in the brain and that it generates me- 
chanical force in the muscles and they have under- 
taken to translate chemical change into thought 
and thought into mechanical force or motion, but 
Mr. Tyndall, than whom there is no greater living 
authority, frankly confesses that the passage from 
chemical changes in the brain to consciousness is 
unthinkable. 

Well, if the two realms are so diametrically differ- 
ent that we cannot even think a connection be- 
tween them, then what is the relation by which 
men universally believe that what we see in the 
physical world will find its counterpart in the world 
of spirit? Let me illustrate the difficulty. The 
world is made up of solid earth, of water, of the 
surrounding atmosphere, and beyond this of ether 
extending indefinitely into space. Now if I can 
see an animal walking the earth I cannot infer 
from hence that if transferred to the water it will 
walk upon its surface ; or if I see a fish swimming 
in the water I cannot conclude that if thrown into 
the air it would swim there, too ; or if I see a bird 
cleaving the air with its wings I am not justified in 



236 THE RESTORING OF 

concluding that when it has soared to the limit of 
our atmosphere it can fly through the fields of 
ether out into space. Each realm has its own laws 
and the same agent when transferred from the 
one to the other will act very differently. How 
then do we certainly conclude when we see Jesus 
restore a withered hand that He will perform the 
counterpart of that cure for the soul, since soul 
and body are in realms so widely separated in na- 
ture? 

That which connects the two worlds and en- 
ables us to pass in thought from the one to the 
other is the continuity of moral principles. Just 
as in the material universe we are certain that the 
law of gravitation will attract all matter whether 
solid, liquid or gaseous, not only upon the earth's 
surface but to the remotest star that wanders in 
the fields of space, so moral principles are the same 
in heaven and in earth, in the physical world and 
in the spiritual, whether applied to an insect or an 
angel. Earth, water and air are all different, they 
have different inhabitants and must be traversed 
by different means, but a duck will walk on the 
land, swim on the water, and fly through the air. 
It will adapt itself to the element to be traversed 
and will obey the laws of the realm in which it acts, 
but it will go through them all. If you lose sight 



THE WITHERED HAND. 237 

of its surroundings and think only of the fowl you 
will clearly see that the propelling force is the de- 
sire for locomotion and you will not doubt that 
that desire will seek its gratification by pushing its 
way through all elements alike. So matter and 
spirit are as wide apart in nature as the poles, they 
each have laws of their own, they are separated by 
an impassable gulf so that the one cannot cross 
over to the other, but a moral principle finds no 
difficulty in passing from the one to the other, un- 
dergoes no change by the transfer and is equally at 
home in both. It will adapt itself to the nature 
and laws of the realm in which it acts, but it will 
act and accomplish its end. Divine goodness will 
not only clothe the grass of the field ; it will clothe 
you, oh ye of little faith ! Nay, more, it will clothe 
immortal souls in robes of spotless white. It will 
not only feed the ravens when they cry, it will also 
feed you with the bread which perishes and here- 
after will spread a feast of marrow and fat things 
for redeemed spirits in Heaven. Divine mercy 
will not only cleanse a leprous body, it will as cer- 
tainly sprinkle clean water upon a polluted spirit 
and wash it whiter than snow. The same principle 
which will raise a dead body to life will resurrect a 
dead soul and breathe into it anew the breath of 
lives. Banish from your thought Christ's sur- 



238 THE RESTORING OF 

roundings and the objects of his benefactions and 
rivet your attention only upon Him and you will 
feel certain that what He does in one realm He 
will repeat in all realms. Let us see Him heal a 
withered hand and we will know that He will 
strengthen a weak soul. There is no analogy be- 
tween a body and a spirit, their diseases have noth- 
ing in common, they must be reached in very dif- 
ferent ways and healed by very different means, 
but when I see Jesus touched with sympathy for 
suffering humanity and seeking to relieve bodily 
misery, I know that the same nature will respond 
to suffering of any kind anywhere and that in the 
realm of spirit He will adapt Himself to the wants 
of the soul so as to heal all its diseases. This is 
nature's logic and it is universal. 

It will not be difficult now to understand why 
Christ who came so specially to save men's souls 
should engage occasionally in healing their bod- 
ies. The Old Testament had prepared the way 
for the great salvation. The prophets had taught 
the analogy between bodily diseases and a sinful 
soul. Isaiah was describing the moral state of the 
people when he exclaimed "The whole head is sick 
and the whole heart is faint; from the sole of the 
foot even to the head there is no soundness in it; 
but wounds and bruises and putrifying sores." 



THE WITHERED HAND. 239 

The people admitted the similarity of the condi- 
tion of a diseased body and a depraved soul. Jesus 
had therefore only to prove himself a physician in 
order to be believed in as a Savior. Men reason 
from the seen to the unseen, from the known to 
the unknown, from the physical to the spiritual. 
Give us a surface outcropping and we will believe 
in mines of untold wealth underground. Jesus 
must exhibit His disposition and ability to relieve 
human misery in the world of sense as the means of 
unlocking the door to the souls of men. Before 
men will open their inmost being to Him they 
must be assured of His mercy and His power. 
Power alone never won any heart. We may trem- 
ble or kneel before it. We may wonder at and 
admire it. But we cannot trust or love it. It 
may have ability to protect and bless, but we can- 
not forget that it is able also to crush and curse. 
Had Jesus simply exhibited almighty power men 
might have cowered before Him to save their lives 
but they would not have repented of their sins and 
loved Him to the saving of their souls. Moral na- 
tures must be reached by moral agencies. A tear 
will do more to convert a sinner from the error of 
his way than the lash, the axe or the flames. Put 
your own big, warm heart so close to the sinner's 
that he can feel its pulsations of love and sympathy 



2 4 o THE RESTORING OF 

and that will do more than dynamite to destroy the 
defences in which he has intrenched himself. But 
sympathy and love may be both warm and sincere 
and yet may be powerless to help us. Before di- 
vine mercy can rule in human hearts it must come 
clad in the armor of almighty power. Let Jesus 
demonstrate to the world that He is touched with 
the feeling of our infirmities and that He is mighty 
to save and strong to deliver and the world cannot 
help seeing in Him the desire of nations and the 
Savior of men. These two qualities must be ex- 
hibited before the eyes of men before Jesus can 
gain an entrance to their souls. It became indis- 
pensably necessary therefore that Jesus should be- 
gin his ministry with the healing of diseases. Had 
He failed to hear the cry for help which came to 
Him from the children of affliction or having heard 
had He refused to respond to it, sin sick souls 
would never have ventured into His presence, but 
covering their wounds and bruises and putrifying 
sores would have slunk back and died in despair. 
Had Jesus failed to restore the withered arm of the 
man in the text no palsied soul would ever have 
stretched its trembling hands towards Him for 
help. On the other hand let Him pity the suffer- 
ing wherever He meets them and let Him heal 
their diseases by miraculous power and every soul 



THE WITHERED HAND. 241 

that feels its need of a Savior will lift up its hands 
to Him for help. He heals bodies only that thus 
He may reach and save souls. 

We are living at a time when strange concep- 
tions of Christian work are afloat in the air. Faith 
cures, mind cures and Christian Science, all march- 
ing under the Christian name, claim that the same 
miraculous power for healing diseases which Christ 
and His apostles exercised has ever since existed 
in the church and that they now possess and have 
power to exercise it. That cures may be wrought 
in some cases by operating upon the mind of the 
patient I have no disposition to deny and am will- 
ing to believe. So far from opposing such efforts 
I wish that the number of their cures might be 
multiplied a hundredfold. But whatever else 
these systems may be, they are not Christian — they 
could be practised by a heathen or an infidel with 
just as much success as by a follower of Christ. 
The active agent in such cures is faith, not in Christ 

but in the faith cure or the mind cure. It is faith 
either in yourself or in the person operating upon 
you or both. Christ's mission was not to take our 
race from under the dominion of disease and death. 
The children of faith must pass through sickness 
and death in common with all mankind. Miracu- 
lous cures had accomplished their mission when 



242 THE RESTORING OF 

they had paved the way for the world to accept 
Jesus as "the mighty to save and strong to deliv- 
er," and they then ceased in the church. Since 
then Christ's voice is heard echoing in the secret 
chambers of the soul and they that hear shall live. 
Christ's great work on earth is to cleanse and cure 
and save the immortal being within. The dwell- 
ing place may fall in ruins meanwhile. Never 
mind. He will rebuild it in due time, and then 
soul and body redeemed beyond the reach of pain 
or death shall be reunited alive forevermore. 



Forgiveness and Love, 



FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 



Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins which are many, are forgiven; for 
she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little. 

— IvUke VII : 47. 



These words form the conclusion and are the ap- 
plication of a parable. In seeking to fathom their 
meaning we must be careful not to separate them 
from their connection, for their proper interpreta- 
tion depends very largely upon their relation to 
the preceding parable. This is only claiming for 
the language of the Savior what is demanded for 
the utterances of any other man. Speech at best 
is but an imperfect method of conveying thought. 
No one sentence in any book expresses all that the 
author means to convey by it. It is expected that 
its meaning will be shaded and modified or magni- 
fied by the shadow of all that has gone before and 
of all that follows after. No author will consent 
to be held accountable for the teaching of any 
single passage of his works unless that passage be 
taken in its connection and interpreted by the light 
of its surroundings. Christ's teachings are no ex- 
ception to the rule. As He employed human lan- 
guage, which is necessarily imperfect and ambigu- 

16 245 



246 FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 

ous, so in seeking to ascertain his meaning in any 
single passage, we must read all that he has said 
upon that subject and get the whole chain of 
thought. Then, from the position which this par- 
ticular link of truth occupies, it will be easy to see 
what burden of meaning he meant it to bear. 

Now, Jesus, of manifest set purpose, prefaced the 
passage under consideration by a beautiful para- 
ble. In interpreting it, therefore, we must keep 
His teaching as a whole before us and give to this 
passage a sense consistent with the whole tenor of 
the parable. 

Simon the Pharisee has taken Jesus home with 
him to dine, and while they were reclining at meat, 
a woman of questionable character entered the 
house, and standing at his feet bathed in tears and 
holding in her hand an alabaster box of ointment, 
began to wash Christ's feet with tears; then she 
wiped them with the hairs of her head and kissed 
them and anointed them with ointment. Simon 
the Pharisee knew the character of the woman and 
felt himself scandalized by the procedure. He did 
not openly rebuke the woman for her intrusion, 
nor did he demand of Christ an explanation or rea- 
son why He permitted such an unseemly exhibi- 
tion of affection toward him. He managed to 
maintain his self composure and to conceal his dis- 



FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 247 

pleasure, but beneath a calm exterior his indigna- 
tion burned against the woman and his distrust 
kindled against Christ's character. The narrative 
says "he spake within himself, saying, this man if 
he were a prophet, would have known who and 
what manner of woman this is that toucheth him ; 
for she is a sinner." He said this within himself and 
never meant that it should go any farther. But 
Jesus was more of a prophet than he dreamed and 
knew every thought that was passing in his most 
secret soul. Simon thought that Christ could not 
tell the character of the woman that touched him, 
and Jesus instantly demonstrates to him that He 
can read the character of Simon's most secret and 
unspoken thought. Turning to His host the Savior 
said, "Simon, I have somewhat to say unto thee," 
and the Pharisee with utmost politness and def- 
erence, responded, "Master, say on." Then Jesus 
said : "There was a certain creditor which had two 
debtors; the one owed five hundred pence and the 
other fifty. And when they had nothing to pay 
he frankly forgave them both. Tell, me, therefore, 
which will love him most?" Simon, perplexed to 
know the meaning of the question and little dream- 
ing that Jesus was preparing an answer to the se- 
cret questionings of his soul, replied, "I suppose 
that he to whom he forgave most." Jesus calmly 



248 FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 

responded, "Thou hast rightly judged." Having 
thus committed the Pharisee to the principle, He 
next proceeded to apply it. Said He: "Seest thou 
this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gav- 
est me no water for my feet, but she hath washed 
my feet with tears and wiped them with the hairs 
of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss, but this 
woman since the time she came in hath not ceased 
to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not 
anoint, but this woman hath anointed my feet with 
ointment. The premises are thus laid down and it 
only remains to draw the conclusion. You say 
that he will love most who has been forgiven most ; 
well, it is perfectly clear that this woman has mani- 
fested a love such as you have not shown, and it 
follows therefore that she must have been forgiven 
a great deal more than you have." 

This is the simple and natural conclusion of the 
Savior's discourse and this is the sense which logi- 
cal consistency demands should be given to the 
text. We are forced thus to understand the pas- 
sage under consideration or else to suppose that 
Christ's logic was very faulty. The text as it stands 
in our version would make the Savior reason thus : 
The one who has been most forgiven will love me 
most. This woman loves me most, therefore I am 
justified in forgiving her many sins. 



FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 249 

He first clearly teaches that the forgiveness is 
the cause of the love and that the extent of the for- 
giveness will be the measure of the love. Then, if 
we take the passage just as it reads in our transla- 
tion, having enumerated the evidences of the wo- 
man's affection, He turns directly round and argues 
that her love is the ground of her forgiveness and 
that the intensity of her love is the message of her 
forgiveness. The Savior is represented as saying, 
"Wherefore, I say unto thee, her sins which are 
many, are forgiven, for she loved much." Hap- 
pily, the passage as it stands in the Greek bears a 
meaning in perfect harmony with all that precedes 
and with all that follows, and logical consistency 
and common sense demand that we give it that 
construction. Where, in our translation, we read 
"her sins which are many," in the Greek the verb 
"are" is wanting and is left to be supplied. Again, 
where we read "are forgiven," the verb is in the 
perfect passive and should be translated "have been 
forgiven." Now suppose we translate the first 
clause literally, giving the verb its own proper 
tense, thus, "her sins have been forgiven." Then 
since the sins are a thing of the past, we are com- 
pelled to change the tense of the verb in the next 
clause since it is -left to be supplied, and make it 
read, "her sins which were many." Combining the 



250 FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 

two clauses thus translated, the whole passage will 
read, "Her sins have been forgiven which were 
many, for she hath loved much." 

Now remembering that this passage is the con- 
clusion of an argument forced by the premises, it 
follows that the verbs, though in the indicative 
mood, must be understood as having the force of 
the potential and as expressing necessity. The 
Savior simply states as a fact what follows as a ne- 
cessity from the argument. When we regard the 
passage thus in its connection, its construction be- 
comes simple and easy. Simon had affirmed that 
he would love most who had been forgiven most. 
Jesus then stated, what Simon was forced to admit, 
that this woman plainly loved most, and the 
inevitable conclusion was that "her sins which 
have been forgiven must have been many." This 
we take to be the proper translation of the passage, 
this gives a consistent meaning and forms a logi- 
cal conclusion to the parable. 

The principle is here clearly laid down, first, that 
we are admitted to Christ's presence not because of 
what we have done for Him, but on account of 
what he has done for us; and secondly, that our 
love ought to be in proportion to our forgiveness. 
Simon had said within himself that the woman was 
a sinner and that therefore Jesus ought not to ac- 



FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 251 

cept her offices of love. He had whispered in his 
own soul, moreover, that Jesus did not know the 
character of the woman and had not prophetic vis- 
ion enough to discover who it was that touched 
Him or He would not have suffered such contam- 
ination. This answer of the Master laid bare the 
secret thought of Simon's heart and showed him 
at the same time that Jesus both knew the charac- 
ter of the woman and of his thoughts. It moreover 
showed how little he knew of the spirit and genius 
of the religion which Jesus came to establish. Like 
a great many nowadays this Pharisee thought that 
a sinner had no right to approach Christ. A self- 
righteous man like himself might sit down with 
Him at meat, but a Magdalene must not even shed 
her tears at His feet. He seemed to think that 
Christ's kingdom, like an earthly kingdom, had its 
ranks and degrees of nobility and that men were 
allowed to approach and serve the king in the or- 
der of their rank. He belonged to a moral nobili- 
ty and was a privileged character, but the woman 
was a plebean sinner and without inquiring whether 
she had reformed and had been forgiven, he could 
not think that Jesus, if He knew her, would suffer 
her in His presence. 

Christ, on the contrary, taught him that He 
"came not to call the righteous but sinners to re- 



252 FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 

pentence." His invitation was "Come unto me all 
ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give 
you rest." He came to earth not as a sovereign 
but as a Savior. His mission was "to the lost sheep 
of the house of Israel." The whole need not a 
physician but they that are sick. He did not come 
to establish a court and thus surround Himself with 
the morally pure — He came to save the lost and 
hence He invited the morally impure to gather 
round Him, that by His touch they might be 
cleansed from their sins and be lifted into a higher 
life. He excluded no one from His presence or 
service, but gave a common invitation to all. They 
who felt their need of Him most would be the first 
to come and their felt need of Him was to be the 
condition of their acceptance when they came. 
Had the woman still been an unpardoned sinner of 
the deepest dye she might have come in penitence 
with perfect confidence that Jesus would not spurn 
her from His presence. "This is a faithful saying 
and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus 
came into the world to save sinners." 

But she was not an unpardoned sinner. Jesus 
plainly states in the text, "Her sins have been for- 
given." How long before that pardon had been 
granted we are not told. Whether Jesus had met 
her upon a previous occasion and had then for- 



FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 253 

given her or whether she had been saved from her 
sins since she entered Simon's house . upon the 
present occasion we do not know. We only know 
that she had been pardoned and that her ministra- 
tions of love were the result of that pardon. It 
may be that, like many another sinner, the moment 
she started to go to Jesus her burden of guilt rolled 
away and that when she arrived in His presence 
she felt no need of pleading for pardon and could 
do nothing but fall at his feet in affectionate devo- 
tion. She may not have understood the meaning 
of the wondrous change which she felt in her soul. 
Many a man since her day has been released from 
his sins without knowing at the time that the 
strange freedom which he felt was "the glorious 
liberty of the children of God." She knew she 
loved Christ and that no spot on earth was so dear 
to her as right at his feet. Her glad soul found 
vent in joyous tears and her loving, grateful heart 
poured costliest ointment on the Savior's feet, 
counting no offering too dear a sacrifice for Christ. 
She is no longer a sinner, but a new creature. 
"The things which before she loved now she hates 
and the things which before she hated now she 
loves." But it is more than probable that she did 
not understand the meaning of this moral change 
— perhaps in the rapture of the moment she did not 



254 FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 

stop to ask the name of her deep joy. Jesus un- 
derstood the case perfectly and in explanation of 
it all turned to her and said, 'Thy sins have been 
forgiven!" She had been a great sinner, but she 
was pardoned and saved now, and hence whatever 
she might have been before would be no bar to 
keep her back from Christ. As a sinner she could 
only have approached the Savior in penitence, but 
as a "sinner saved by grace" she can come to Him 
now in affection, in worship and in service. When 
God pardons a man He makes clean work of it. 
He does not tell him that he is forgiven and then 
put him under ban ever afterward because he has 
been a great sinner. I read of the sinner in God's 
word, "If he turn from his sin and do that which is 
lawful and right ; if the wicked restore the pledge, 
give again that he had robbed, walk in the statutes 
of life without committing iniquity, he shall surely 
live, he shall not die. None of his sins that he hath 
committed shall be mentioned unto him." 

When Jesus pardoned that woman He did not 
brand her with a scarlet letter after the olden fash- 
ion of New England and thus make her an outcast 
in respectable society. His pardon obliterated all 
the past and admitted her upon an equal footing to 
His presence with any other person on earth. We 
often hear it said, "I can forgive, but I cannot for- 



FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 255 

get." "I could pardon the outcast, but I could not 
receive her into my house." Prudential reasons 
may make it necessary that safeguards should be 
thrown around human forgiveness. But that is 
not the way in which Christ forgives. He says, "I 
will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their 
sin no more." He gathers the outcasts right to 
Himself and takes them into His house. The very 
fact that we are sinners saved entitles us to a place 
near the Savior. Not the cold hearted Pharisee 
who patronizes and treats Christ with respect is 
accepted of him but the sinner who falls in affection 
and devotion at his feet. 

This woman had sinned greatly, she had been 
greatly saved ; was it any wonder that she loved 
deeply? John says, "We love Him because He 
first loved us." A self-righteous man who feels 
pretty secure in his own correct life will not feel 
that Christ has done much for him and in conse- 
quence will not fall often in affectionate worship 
and service at Jesus feet But oh, in degree as we 
realize that we were lost and ruined sinners and 
that Christ's great salvation plucked us as brands 
from the burning, we ought in love and gratitude, 
like the poor sinner in the text, to fall at Jesus' feet, 
bathe them in our tears, cover them with kisses and 
perfume them with costliest ointment. Through 



256 FORGIVENESS AND LOVE. 

eternity I think we will bless God for two things: 
first that Jesus both forgave and forgot our sins, 
restoring us to his presence and favor fully justified, 
and secondly that we do not and cannot forget that 
we were sinners saved by Christ. We will rejoice 
that God does not remember our sins, but we will 
want to remember them forever, for it is the very 
fact that we have been greatly saved that makes 
Jesus our great Savior. We will remember what 
we were and what He saved us from and love Him 
all the more because He does not remind us of it. 
If there is any man on earth that has a right to get 
near Christ and that Jesus has reason to expect to 
find near by Him it is the man whose sins have 
been many and who has been saved from them. 



Objects of Faith. 



OBJECTS OF FAITH. 



What things soever ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive them 
and ye shall have them. 



We walk in two worlds from the cradle to the 
grave. Man is made up of body and spirit, and he 
is placed in a world that is both material and im- 
material, and so at every step in life he is treading 
both upon pavements and promises. Two guides 
meet man at the threshold of existence to con- 
duct him through life, nor is it possible for him to 
make the journey without the assistance of both. 
Sense takes our one hand and faith takes the other, 
and while the one shows us our way through the 
life that now is, the other leads us to the life which 
is to come. 

The testimony of our senses is no more direct 
and positive than that of faith — the only difference 
between them is that sense brings to the soul the 
knowledge of material things while faith is the 
channel through which we receive knowledge of 
spiritual things. How do I know that there is 
such a planet as Saturn rolling through space? I 
was never there. I never saw any one who had 
been there. I never saw anything in the sky that 

»7 2 59 



26o OBJECTS OF FAITH. 

looked like a world. With my naked eye I can 
see only a brilliant point of light in the nightly 
heavens, and with the most powerful telescope I 
can see nothing more than a shining ball of light 
with oval rings of light surrounding it. The truth 
is, I do not see a world, I only see the light which 
comes streaming from that planet. But the light 
which I see has strange stories to tell of the world 
from which it comes. Upon the testimony of the 
light alone we learn the size and distance of Saturn 
from the earth, its course through space and its 
rate of motion and even determine the elements 
which enter into its constitution. But for the tes- 
timony of the light to our sense of vision we could 
know nothing about this planet, or ever have 
known of its existence. We are never brought 
into direct contact with it and our only knowledge 
of it comes to us on the wings of the light. Throw 
suspicion for a moment upon the truthfulness of 
the story which this dazzling messenger tells and 
our knowledge of Saturn vanishes into thin air. 
Our senses create no knowledge; they simply 
communicate to the soul the testimony which 
they receive about surrounding objects. 

Well, just as God has given us the light to re- 
veal to the soul through the sense of sight the ex- 
istence and nature of the material bodies which 



OBJECTS OF FAITH. 261 

roll through space, so has He given us the revela- 
tion of His word to discover to the soul through 
the eye of faith the realities of the spirit universe 
around us. We cannot see Saturn but we can be- 
lieve that he exists because the light which comes 
from him tells us all about him and so we can see 
neither God nor Heaven, but Jesus Christ has 
come from God out of Heaven to our earth and 
testifies concerning His Father and His Father's 
house. He is the light of the world and through 
the revelation which He has made we can know 
as much of the spirit-Heaven and know it as di- 
rectly and as certainly, as we can learn through the 
senses of the material heavens. The eye is made 
to convey the light of day to the soul and faith is 
made to convey the light of Deity to the soul. The 
sources of the light are different and the channels 
through which it streams in upon us are different, 
but the knowledge conveyed is as direct and posi- 
tive in the one case as in the other. 

Does any one question the revelation of God's 
word? You may as well question the evidences 
of the senses. False prophets have gone out into 
the world and there have been spurious revela- 
tions. It is possible therefore that faith may be 
deceived and led astray. But the light in the ma- 
terial world has its aberrations also. Not every- 



262 OBJECTS OF FAITH. 

body that shines in, the heavens is a fixed star or a 
planet. There is many a wandering comet or 
meteor that shines for a while and then goes out. 
It is possible that we may misunderstand God's 
word and thus receive false notions of the Divine 
nature and law ; and so it is certain that the human 
eye is often diseased and the lens of the telescope 
is imperfect and in consequence men see only 
blurred and distorted images of the heavenly bod- 
ies. There have been as many blunders in astro- 
nomy as there ever have been in theology. But 
because mistakes are possible, it is not necessary 
that we should make them either in the universe 
of matter or of spirit. Amid all the rubbish of ex- 
ploded science the student can find a plain and 
solid pathway of truth for his feet and so, amid all 
the varying creeds and mysteries of religion the 
road to God is so plain that a "wayfaring man 
though a fool need not err therein." The imper- 
fections in our knowledge spring from the imper- 
fections of our nature, and neither science nor re- 
ligion are to blame for them; but however great 
our ignorance may be, we can walk at least as se- 
curely by the light of revelation as we can by the 
light of nature. 

The text addresses the religious side of our na- 
tures and calls for the exercise of faith in order to 



OBJECTS OF FAITH. 263 

the realization of our prayers. A man cannot see 
with his eyes shut, and he cannot see what he de- 
sires to unless he have his eyes turned towards the 
object. And so in religion we will never realize our 
prayers while faith slumbers, nor yet with faith in 
full exercise unless faith be directed to the proper 
object. Men had swept the heavens at random 
with their telescopes in all directions without dis- 
covering the cause of the disturbance among the 
planets until Leverrier, determining upon the defi- 
nite spot where a world was needed to balance the 
planetary system, leveled his glass and gazed in- 
tently into space, when lo ! Neptune's pale light 
came breaking through the dark and solved the 
problem. In religion we often ask and receive 
not because we ask amiss. We often ask aright 
and receive not because we believe not, and we of- 
ten believe and receive not because faith is not di- 
rected to the proper object. 

First of all, "Whatsoever things we desire when 
we pray/ must be in accordance with God's will, if 
our prayer is to be granted. Indeed we ought not 
desire anything which is contrary to the will of 
God. We may think we need a great many things 
which God will never grant, because they would 
not be for our good. His will and our welfare go 
hand in hand. To ask what is contrary to the Di- 



264 OBJECTS OF FAITH. 

vine will is to pray God to curse and not to bless 
us. Every Christian prayer ought to conclude in 
spirit if not in language, "Not my will but thine 
be done." But, then, we must not only pray for 
those things which it is God's good pleasure to 
give, we must also offer our prayers in faith if we 
would realize their fulfillment. "Whatsoever 
things ye desire when ye pray, believe," said Jesus, 
"and ye shall have them." "According to your 
faith so shall it be done unto you." You may call 
till doomsday, but if you close your ears you will 
have no answer. You may pray for visions of 
God till you are grey, but if you do not open the 
eyes of faith and look you will never see the King 
in His beauty. When you pray, clear your soul's 
vision, brush away doubt and misgivings, polish 
the lenses of faith and let expectancy look out 
through them from the soul. Watching and prayer 
go together in more senses than one. When ye 
pray, watch, look, wait, expect. Ladders of light are 
set up upon earth which reach unto Heaven now 
no less than in patriarchal times. Wherever souls 
are agonizing with God in prayer, the angels are 
ascending and descending, but too often, like 
Jacob, faith slumbers and Heaven's visitations 
only come to us as a dream and we wake to ex- 



OBJECTS OF FAITH. 265 

claim with him, "Surely the Lord was in this place 
and I knew it not." 

But the text teaches further that our faith must 
be centered upon the proper object if we would 
realize the fulfillment of our prayers. Mr. Moody 
once approached a penitent in one of his inquiry 
meetings and asked him what appeared to be his 
special difficulty. The man answered, "O, sir, I 
cannot believe." "Believe what?" asked Mr. 
Moody. "Can't you believe in the truth of God's 
word and in the ability and willingness of Jesus to 
save you?" "O, yes," responded the penitent, "I 
can easily believe that, but I cannot believe in my- 
self." "I cannot believe that I am a proper sub- 
ject for saving grace." "Well," replied Mr. Moo- 
dy, "nobody wants you to believe in yourself, be- 
lieve on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be 
saved." We smile at that poor penitent's mistake 
and yet men are doing the same thing every day 
and everywhere. There is no more common blun- 
der made in religion than to mistake the proper 
object of faith. "Look unto me and be ye saved 
all the ends of the earth," says God. But instead 
of looking heavenward and Godward men will look 
into the large end of the telescope to see how they 
themselves appear as seen from above. A man 
reads "He that believeth on the Son of God hath 



266 OBJECTS OF FAITH. 

the witness in himself" and at once he begins to 
look within to see if the witness is there. But look- 
ing at self will never save us and searching for the 
witness of the Spirit will not bring it into our soul. 
"What things soever ye desire when ye pray, be- 
lieve," says Jesus. But believe what? 

Many people have been widely led astray from 
the true object of faith just by misinterpreting the 
remainder of this passage. They have supposed 
the Master here to teach that when they pray for 
any blessing they are all the while to endeavor to 
believe that they do experience the thing for which 
they are pleading. The passage reads, "believe 
that ye receive them and ye shall have them." And 
so they conclude that in order to obtain a change 
of heart we must first believe that we already have 
it. Must we then believe a falsehood in order to 
be saved? Does the Master mean to teach in this 
passage that when we pray we must believe that 
we are in possession of the blessings which we de- 
sire in order to come into their possession? A 
careful examination of the passage will show both 
how great is the error of such a supposition and 
what is the true object of our belief. 

Two objects of faith are clearly implied here: 
first, God's promise, and second, God's veracity. 
We have already seen that we must neither desire 



OBJECTS OF FAITH. 267 

nor ask anything which is not in accordance with 
the Divine will, because it would not be for our 
good. All things which are for our good have 
been made the subjects of Divine promise; for our 
Heavenly Father has bound Himself by a prom- 
ise to "withhold no good thing from them that 
walk uprightly." But, like many an earthly par- 
ent, God suspends many blessings which He has in 
waiting for His children upon the condition of 
their asking for them. "Ask, and it shall be given 
you." "If ye shall ask anything in my name I will 
do it" is the broad invitation which Heaven ex- 
tends to the children of men. Now, when we ask 
anything in prayer, the first object of faith is the 
fact that God has promised it. You must first 
rest in an unwavering belief that your petition is 
bounded on all sides by Divine promise and envir- 
onment in the Divine will, or your prayer will be 
in vain. But having settled the fact that you are 
asking only what God's word has promised, the 
next object of faith is God's veracity. He has 
promised, will He be true to His word? There 
must be no faltering here. Doubt must suggest 
no "maybe" or "perhaps" in the case. Faith must 
grapple as with hooks of steel upon the truth that 
God's promises are all yea and amen in Christ 
Jesus. "He is faithful that promised," and our 



268 OBJECTS OF FAITH. 

faith must anchor itself deep in the Divine faithful- 
ness, believing without tremor or doubt that He 
will fulfill all His word. 

These two objects of faith are implied in the 
text ; a third is clearly expressed, viz. : that our 
prayer is granted. There is logic in faith as well 
as in reason. Believe, as premises, that God has 
promised the thing for which you pray and that 
He is true to His word, and you are forced to the 
conclusion that He does grant your prayer. Be- 
lief in the promise and veracity of God are two 
lenses in faith's telescope — make them perfectly 
clean, and properly adjust them and you cannot 
look steadily through them without seeing your 
request fulfilled. But, dazzled by the light which 
comes" streaming through them, faith often closes 
its eyes and hesitates or refuses to look the truth 
squarely in the face that its prayer has prevailed 
and that its petition is granted. Now Jesus in the 
text places faith in focus and bids the praying soul 
look through it to God. "What things soever ye 
desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive them 
and ye shall have them." You believe that God 
has promised them, you believe that God is faithful 
to His word. He has said "Ask, and ye shall re- 
ceive;" you have asked, now believe that ye re- 



OBJECTS OF FAITH. 269 

ceive, believe that, true to His promise, He this 
moment grants your prayer. 

Ah, but, says one, I don't feel any change of 
heart. Never mind; that is not the object of faith 
but the result and fruit of it. The assurance of 
faith must precede the realization of experience. 
You must first believe that you have received sal- 
vation as a grant from God before you can realize 
it as a personal experience, but believe that ye re- 
ceive it as a gift on the part of God and ye shall 
have it as a possession of the soul. Let me illustrate, 
Here is a youth who has not yet attained his ma- 
jority. He is far away from home, but one day a 
letter and a package reach him through the mail. 
He opens the letter and reads that his father is 
dead and that he has bequeathed to him the old 
homestead. He next breaks the package and 
there finds a certified copy of his father's will. 
There is no mistake about it, it bears the seal of 
the court and is properly signed and attested. As 
the letter informed him, the whole of his father's 
landed estate is bequeathed to him. Now, he does 
not come into actual possession of the property 
until he reaches twenty-one years of age. But he 
receives it as an inheritance now. The title rests 
in him from the present moment. The transfer is 
complete in law now, though the transfer in fact 



2;o OBJECTS OF FAITH. 

will not take place until several years hence. Does 
he believe that he receives that property before he 
actually gets it? Let him convince himself that the 
will conveys it to him and that the will will certain- 
ly be executed, and he regards himself that mo- 
ment as the owner of the whole estate, and from 
that time forward will esteem himself and will be 
esteemed by others as a landed proprietor and a 
man of fortune. 

Far away from his Father's house the sinner re- 
ceives God's message and this Bible containing his 
Father's will. It grants to him more than houses 
and lands upon the condition of his asking for 
them in faith. When he has complied with the 
conditions must he wait until he comes into actual 
possession of tbem hefore he claims them as his? 
Why, the moment he calls upon God believing in 
His promise and veracity, he becomes an heir of 
God and the wealth of the everlasting Father is 
his. The inheritance belongs to the heir and 
all that God's will has promised is now transferred 
to him in right. Let him believe that he receives 
it this moment as his inheritance and he shall have 
it by and by as his possession. Do you tell me 
that he feels no change? Can a man believe that 
he has been changed from an heir of death to an 
heir of everlasting life and feel no change? Can 



OBJECTS OF FAITH. 271 

a slave believe that he has been adopted as the son 
of a king and not feel that he is a new man? Let 
a man believe that he is an heir of God and he will 
enter into the enjoyment of his inheritance long 
before he reaches his Father's house. 

Or take another illustration. There is a culprit 
who has been tried and convicted of murder and 
has been sentenced to death. Behind iron bars he 
rattles his chains and awaits the day of his execu- 
tion. As a last resort he sends an appeal to the 
governor of the state invoking the executive par- 
don. A few days thereafter the keeper of the pris- 
on hands him an envelope through the grates of 
his cell. He opens it and reads that in answer to 
his petition the governor has freely pardoned him 
and set him at full liberty. The signature is un- 
mistakably genuine and the document bears the 
big seal of the state. Does he believe that he is a 
free man? Why, his cell is still barred and bolted, 
his manacles are still on and he is clothed in the 
prison garb. Can he feel free while he is yet a 
prisoner in chains? Go ask him, and you shall find 
that he dates his freedom from the moment he re- 
ceived the pardon. Prison dress and chains and 
bars set lightly on his soul. He asked pardon and 
freedom, he believes that he has received them, 
and he shall have them. He does not look at him- 



272 OBJECTS OF FAITH. 

self and say, Why, I see no change; if I am par- 
doned these manacles ought to be off and these 
doors ought to be open. He rivets his gaze upon 
the document which he holds in his hand and ex- 
claims, This is the governor's pardon; I have re- 
ceived it, I am therefore free in law and soon shall 
be in fact. 

Every sinner occupies that prisoner's cell. We 
have all been condemned by the law and sentenced 
to death. The angel of the Gospel came and whis- 
pered that there was "forgiveness with God that 
he might be feared;" and so we tremblingly sent 
our petition to the great governor of the universe 
for pardon. In due time the answer came — here 
we have it in God's word : "If we confess our sins 
He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to 
cleanse us from all unrighteousness." "Though 
your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as 
snow, and though they be red like crimson they 
shall be as wool." "Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ and thou shalt be saved." "I will forgive 
their iniquity and I will remember their sin no 
more." O, brother sinner, don't look at yourself 
and say, Why, here are the scarlet and crimson 
stains still ; I don't feel the change that I expected ; 
I am not yet entirely released from my bondage. 
Fix the eye of your faith on God Almighty's pardon 



OBJECTS OF FAITH. 273 

bearing the seal of the cross, stamped in the blood 
of the Lamb, believe that you have received salva- 
tion and you shall have it. Accept it by faith and 
you will have it in fact. 



False Christs. 



FALSE CHRISTS. 

For there shall arise false Christs.— Matthews XXIV : 24. 

We are accustomed to regard this and similar 
passages of Scripture as belonging to an age long 
since past and gone. At once, upon reading them, 
we think of the numerous impostors that appeared 
about the time of our Savior's advent, claiming to 
be the Messiah, and who each succeeded in de- 
ceiving large numbers of people. Perhaps we 
come down as late as the days of Mahomet, and 
count him among the number. But farther down 
the ages we never go in search of false Christs. 
Here we pause and feel assured that these prophe- 
cies have had their fulfillment. 

The thought is seldom entertained for a mo- 
ment that it is possible for a rival Christ to arrive 
in our day. Superstition and credulity we loud- 
ly boast have been so far exterminated by the ad- 
vance of knowledge and general intelligence, that 
an impostor who should lay claim to Messiahship 
now would find it difficult to hoodwink the people, 
and would be almost certain of speedy exposure 
and defeat. It is possible for us thus to rest in fan- 
cied security when danger is at the door. It should 
18 277 



^S FALSE CHRISTS. 

never be forgotten that Jesus represents the age 
of false Christs, not as that immediately succeeding 
His own, but as the last days. I grant that it is 
exceedingly improbable that we shall ever behold 
a man laying claim to Messiahship. The difficul- 
ties in the way of sustaining the character of Christ 
are such that none but a madman would undertake 
it, and such an one would meet with poor success. 
But while there is no room for fear that any man 
can ever so imitate the life and character of Jesus 
as to become a dangerous rival, we should not 
forget that false Christ's may enter the world and 
walk the earth in other forms than those of flesh 
and blood. The very learning that makes us se- 
cure against any human impostor may introduce 
a false Christ in a subtler and much more danger- 
ous form. 

The truth is that the boasted progress of mod- 
ern times has almost lost sight of the simple Jesus 
of Nazareth, and in His stead has set up a score of 
rivals, as unlike Him as the cold corpse is unlike 
the living, breathing, loving man. The Christ that 
was born in Bethlehem has now to compete with 
the Christ born in a poet's fancy, in a philosopher's 
studio, or in some sentimentalist's brain. The no- 
ble, grand, yet simple Nazarene has been stripped 
again and again of His own plain garments and 



FALSE CHRISTS. 279 

clothed as often with purple robes by sacrilegious 
hands, until in the popular Christ of to-day you 
can hardly recognize the features of Him who 
needed no purple to make Him a king. 

It would be an endless task to outline all the 
characters that men have ascribed to Christ. With- 
in the time allotted to a sermon we can only glance 
at a few of the false Christs that have gone out 
into the world. A few, however, may serve as 
types of all. 

And first we may name, as having appeared first 
in chronological order, the Christ of Art. We 
have become so accustomed to the paintings of 
the old masters that we are not startled by their 
misrepresentation. Indeed, their conceptions have 
so moulded our ideals of Christ that we very gen- 
erally accept the Messiah on their canvas as the 
Jesus of the New Testament. But if, never hav- 
ing seen the Savior represented in pictures, and, 
having formed our conception of Him only from 
the study of the Scriptures, we should enter some 
gallery of old paintings, we should be startled to 
find here and there all along the walls a noble, 
manly figure with a halo painted round his brow. 
If he were seated upon a throne, we might easily 
conjecture that he represented the glorified and 
ascended Jesus in Heaven. But in one place we 



280 FALSE CHRISTS. 

find Him in the act of blessing children, in anoth- 
er, seated with twelve men at table, and in still an- 
other, nailed to a cross. He is always surrounded 
by earthly objects, and yet the halo always encir- 
cles His head. This picture would be so unlike 
the one painted by the evangelists that we should 
hardly recognize in it the simple Nazarene. No 
halo glows round Christ's brow in the New Tes- 
tament. The evangelists' account of Him encir- 
cles his head but twice, once with thorns and once 
with a napkin. At all other times, if we except 
the transfiguration, having taken upon himself the 
form of a servant, He appears simply as the car- 
penter's son, with nothing to mark His peerless 
rank. The glory of His humiliation was that He 
so completely smothered the fires of deity beneath 
His humanity that they never blazed out but once, 
and then only for an instant on a lonely mountain 
top with but three apostles as witnesses. 

But our wonder at this false Christ of art would 
cease perhaps, when, looking a little farther, we 
beheld this same halo round an infant brow, and 
that infant form folded in the arms of a mother 
over whose head another circle of light was hover- 
ing. This painting would be a very old one. A 
later one would represent the Son sitting on a 
throne with the mother crowned and sitting at His 



FALSE CHRISTS. 281 

feet. A still later one would represent the Mother 
and the Son sitting side by side to indicate their 
equality. In one later still we should find the 
mother on a throne above the Son. And last of 
all we should find a picture representing the Son 
in wrath about to destroy the earth, and the virgin 
mother interposing to save mankind. Would any 
reader of the Bible dream that this was Mary and 
her Son Jesus? Where in all the Gospel records 
is the virgin mother associated with the Messiah? 
As if to prevent this very error, Christ said to her 
when at Cana she assumed to command His mirac- 
ulous power, "Woman, what have I to do with 
thee?" He thus denied her right to command, 
while with the affection of a son He did what she 
desired. Still later in life, He absolved Himself 
as Messiah, from all ties and obligation of kindred. 
"Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?" 
asked the Master. In the next breath He answers, 
"Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which 
is in Heaven, the same is my brother and sister and 
mother." The Christ of the New Testament has 
no associate in His mediatorial office, and this, 
therefore, that we behold, is a false Christ of Art. 
But, leaving the picture gallery, with its mil- 
dewed canvas, let us enter the public libraries and 
the great schools of Christendom, and mingle 



282 FALSE CHRISTS. 

with the minds that are exercising a world-wide 
influence in the education of the present day. 
Find we no false Christs here? Take up Strauss 
and carefully peruse him, and you shall not read 
far before you come to the bald statement that 
Jesus Christ is only a myth. That no such per- 
son ever lived on the earth. That He is only the 
ideal hero of fictitious Gospels. He talks of Christ, 
but his Christ is neither God nor man — he is sim- 
ply an idea; he existed neither in Heaven nor on 
earth, but only in the minds of men. He is simply 
the philosopher's "summum bonum," the poet's 
"beau ideal." Strauss does not assail the faultless 
character ascribed by the evangelists to our Sav- 
ior. He knew too well that the world would never 
consent to be robbed of that precious model ; but, 
separating it from the living Nazarene, he holds 
the lifeless, ideal character up before men and calls 
this corpse Christ. He reminds one very much of 
Jacob's sons, who, while they could coolly murder 
or sell their brother Joseph, could not part with 
his coat of many colors but must strip him and 
bring it back all bloody to the homestead to mock 
the patriarch's grief. I call this mythical Jesus a 
false Christ upon the authority of God's word and 
is the teaching that would blot out Christ's real 
existence any better than the murderous voices of 



FALSE CHRISTS. 283 

the mob who originally cried, "Away with Him, 
crucify Him, crucify Him"? "Every spirit that 
confesseth not that Jesus Christ has come in the 
flesh, is not of God, and this is that spirit of anti- 
christ whereof ye have heard that it should come, 
and even now already is it in the world." 

This myth, however, is not the only false Christ 
that has gone out in philosophy. Rationalism has 
given birth to another and a very different one. 
Here we find Jesus invested with flesh and blood 
and fully granted an actual and natural existence 
on the earth. But rationalism admits nothing su- 
pernatural, and hence it denies the Divine in His 
nature, and the miraculous in His life. It makes 
Him a sublime teacher and a lofty model of moral 
purity and experience ; but, by denying His Divin- 
ity, it takes all authority from His teachings and 
blasts His morality by branding Him as an impos- 
tor. It cannot be questioned that He claimed to 
be Divine and constantly represented Himself as 
the Son of God. If, therefore, He was only a 
man, He must either have been a deluded fanatic, 
or an unprincipled deceiver. 

Renan does not hesitate to deny His divinity 
and to affirm that He was both a fanatic and a de- 
ceiver. His Christ was an enthusiastic young man 
whose mission was to reform the morals of the 



284 FALSE CHRISTS. 

people. For this purpose, because the masses de- 
manded prodigies as proof, He feigned the perfor- 
mance of miracles which He had no power to 
work. As the penalty of His enthusiasm and de- 
ception He was crucified by the legal authorities 
and buried in a criminal's grave. Regarding Him 
simply as a man, this author refuses to follow Him 
farther than the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, de- 
claring His work as a biographer to be ended when 
his hero is dead, and scouting the alleged resur- 
rection on the third day as too absurd for serious 
investigation. The author of Ecce Homo, less 
bold and more reverential, but scarcely less ration- 
alistic, disposes of all that was supernatural in the 
birth and early history of Jesus by leaping over 
thirty years of His life and commencing His biog- 
raphy "at a time when he whom we call Christ 
bore no such name, but was simply ... a young 
man of promise, popular with those who knew him 
and appearing to enjoy the Divine favor." One 
author passes over in silence the supernatural man- 
ner in which Jesus entered our world and never 
mentions His miraculous conception and the 
strange surrounding of His birth. Another ig- 
nores altogether the supernatural manner in which 
He left the earth, and sneers at the possibility of 
His resurrection, while both unite to explain away 



FALSE CHRISTS. 285 

all that was miraculous in His public ministry. 
Thus having shorn Him of His locks of strength 
and made Him weak like other men, they conde- 
scend to admit His many simply human virtues 
and to call Him Christ. A myth and a man stalk 
boldly through rationalistic philosophy and are 
each called Christ by high authority. The one is 
an idea that never wore flesh and blood, the other 
is a being that never "came in the flesh" because 
he never existed out of the flesh, he is a man "of 
the earth, earthy." Both are false Christs, the 
bastard offspring of brains that assume to be wise 
above that which is written. Let revelation be re- 
peated : "Whosoever shall not confess that Jesus 
Christ is come in the flesh, is not of God." 

Another false Christ we meet, not in painting 
galleries, nor in schools and libraries, but out in 
society everywhere. It is the Christ of humanitar- 
ianism. In every village and hamlet of our country 
men are to be found who deny eternal punishment. 
They tell us that God is too good and merciful to 
take vengeance upon those who obey not the Gos- 
pel of His Son, notwithstanding the Bible declares 
exactly the contrary. Justice has been expunged 
from their Gospel and they read only gentleness, 
forbearance and mercy in Christ. Providence with 
them is simply reformatory and never punitive. 



286 FALSE CHRISTS. 

And beyond this world there is one glorious Heav- 
en the common home of all our race. When God 
sends a deluge and destroys the wicked inhabi- 
tants of the earth, it is only to wash away their 
sins and take their spirits home to Heaven. Noah, 
because he was righteous, must outride the storm 
and linger longer on the earth; the others, be- 
cause they were wicked, were transported to glory. 
There is no hell in the humanitarian Gospel, and 
hence every man must go to heaven. Murderers, 
assassins, pirates, robbers, burglars, thieves, incen- 
diaries, libertines and blasphemers are all wel- 
comed by a Christ who is all mercy, to the city of 
pearly gates and golden streets. Judas, after be- 
traying the Savior, committed suicide, and he, 
therefore, reached Heaven before his Lord. The 
drunkard who dies in delirium tremens, wakes 
amid the glories of paradise, while the sober man 
of God lives on to sigh and weep amid the sorrows 
of earth. 

Nay, more, this milk and water Gospel teaches 
that men should be like Christ, and since God will 
not punish the guilty, they must be all mercy to 
criminals. It loudly clamors for the abolition of 
capital punishment, not as a matter of expediency, 
or as a measure by which to prevent the execution 
of the innocent, but because of sympathy for the 



FALSE CHRISTS. 287 

guilty. Prisons, too, must be fitted up with all the 
"modern improvements" for the comfort and con- 
venience of their occupants. Prison discipline 
also must be exceedingly mild and the men who 
trampled law beneath their feet must be treated 
with great respect by the law. Singularly enough 
this sympathy is not excited in behalf of the inno- 
cent. A murdered family, a house in flames kin- 
dled by an incendiary's torch, or a widow robbed 
of the last mite of her savings, never suggests 
measures for protection. But when the man is 
found whose hands are red with innocent blood, 
or black with the smoke of the fire which he kin- 
dled, or still grasping the gold which he stole, this 
tender-hearted sympathy blazes up into a flame 
and pronounces all punishment barbarous and 
cruel. The only remedy of this Gospel for crime 
is a prayer and a tract. It is not my province to 
discuss the expediency of modifying the penalties 
of our criminal code — this is a matter for jurists 
and polticians to settle. But I should be unworthy 
a place in the pulpit if I did not pronounce false 
any system which represents Christ as wanting in 
justice or that teaches that His religion forbids the 
punishment of crime. A Christ that has no pun- 
ishment for criminals here nor for incorrigible sin- 
ners hereafter, is not the Christ of the New Testa- 



288 FALSE CHRISTS. 

merit. I read from Scripture, "But if thou do that 
which is evil, be afraid ; for he (the civil ruler) bear- 
eth not the sword in vain, for he is the minister of 
God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that 
doeth evil." God does not grant a severer justice 
to man than he exercises himself, hence I read 
Christ's own words addressed to the hypocritical 
Pharisees, "Ye generation of vipers, how can ye 
escape the damnation of hell?" "Except ye re- 
pent ye shall all likewise perish." "Then shall He — ■ 
(the Son of Man at the judgment) — say also unto 
them on the left hand, Depart from me ye cursed 
into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and 
his angels." The humanitarian's Christ, with no 
justice, is powerless either to protect by human 
government the innocent of society on earth, or 
to reward the holy, by exalting them above the 
wicked, in Heaven. The Jesus of Nazareth was 
not wanting in mercy as His blood-stained cross 
will testify, but that mercy was wedded to a stern 
justice that demanded respect for His law, and fur- 
nished protection for His people. In the Nazar- 
ene justice towers like a mighty oak, while mercy 
twines herself like an ivy round its rugged trunk 
and hangs in graceful dependence from every 
bough. 



FALSE CHRISTS. 289 

Many false Christs have gone out into the world 
of which I have named but a few, and the one 
great lesson taught by this fact is that the world 
cannot do without a Christ. One may rob Him 
of His Deity, another of His humanity, and still 
another of His attributes, but the desolate heart of 
the race will not let go altogether of its Savior. Men 
may tear the vines with their rich clusters from the 
trellis and cover it all over with wild and poisonous 
weeds, but with the trellis they cannot dispense. 
They may strip the Nazarene, may crown Him 
with thorns or clothe Him with purple, but the un- 
derlying idea of a Christ is indispensable to the 
human heart. 

Since, then, we must have a Christ, let us turn 
from the false to the true. There He stands — not 
a mere myth nor yet with a halo round His brow, 
but a man of like passions with ourselves. "Not a 
man who cannot be touched with the feeling of 
our infirmities, but one who was tempted in all 
points like as we are, yet without sin." Bone of 
our bone and flesh of our flesh, a man among men. 

But look again and behold not merely the Son 
of Man, but the Son of God as well. The babe 
of Bethlehem is the "Ancient of Days." He who 
came in the flesh, existed before flesh was made. 
He declares Himself, "Before Abraham was, I 



290 FALSE CHRISTS. 

am." "In the begining was the Word, and the 
Word was with God. and the Word was God ; and 
the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." 
The "Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" is 
at the same time, "Wonderful, Counsellor, the 
Mighty God, the Everlasting Father and the 
Prince of Peace." Humanity is instinct with Dei- 
ty and "the man who had not where to lay His 
head" is "God over all, blessed forever." 

His life was not an illusion, it was real and nat- 
ural. "He grew in wisdom and in stature and in 
favor both with God and man." He grew hungry 
and weary and sad like other men. He ate and 
slept and wept and suffered and died in common 
with all our race. His life was touchingly beau- 
tiful in its simple naturalness ; but then the natural 
in Him was supplemented by all that was astound- 
ingly supernatural and miraculous. His voice, so 
low and sweet that it hushed the wail of sorrow, 
was, at the same time, so shrill and loud that it 
penetrated the grave, and brought the dead back 
to life. His hand, so human that it could be nailed 
to a cross, was at the same time so Divine that mir- 
acles throbbed in every finger, and its lightest 
touch sufficed to feed the hungry, to heal the sick 
and to restore sight to the blind. He could suffer, 
groan and die like a man, but the granite walls of 



FALSE CHRISTS. 291 

the tomb were flimsy as gossamer when the super- 
natural within Him told Him it was time for Him 
to rise. His walk through life was in the common 
path that men had traveled for ages, but as He 
passed over it, it glittered with the wonders of 
Heaven. His sandals made only human tracks in 
the sand, but in those tracks He left gold dust and 
jewels, as though He had just stepped from the 
mosaic pavement of the skies. His life, so simple 
and human, was crowned and covered with the 
miraculous glory of Heaven. His public ministry 
is explicable only by the miracle of His incarna- 
tion and both are enigmas that can never be solved 
without the miracle of His resurrection. The nat- 
ural and the supernatural are inseparably inter- 
woven in the birth, life and death of the true 
Christ. He entered our world through a curtain 
of mystery, through life He communed with the 
invisible, and at last a cloud received Him out of 
sight. 

His attributes were so nicely poised that men 
approached Him with confidence and left Him 
with reverence. They feared while they loved, 
and loved while they feared. His brow was all 
sunlight to the penitent, but all storm to the wick- 
ed. His mercy went down as deep as suffering 

19 



292 FALSE CHRISTS. 

had ever penetrated, and His justice rose as high 
as wrong had ever climbed. There was something 
in His very presence that distilled hope into the 
despairing soul, and something also, that made the 
hypocritical and the proud cower and tremble. 
His very character was a constant encouragement 
to the fallen who desired to rise, and a perpetual 
condemnation to the impenitent wicked. Men 
could not help but feel that He was a "Lord of 
long suffering and of great mercy, forgiving ini- 
quity and transgression," but that at the same time 
He was one "who would by no means clear the 
guilty." Justice in Him made mercy strong, and 
mercy made justice lovely. The shield of the one 
accompanied the sword of the other and made 
Him as strong to punish His enemies as to protect 
His children. Such is the Christ of the New Tes- 
tament. There He stands, the uncrowned and 
untitled Nazarene, simple in His Godlike grandeur 
and grand in His human simplicity, towering as 
high above all false Christs as the pyramid of 
Cheops above the sand hills of the Nile. Perish 
the Christs which human art and philosophy have 
conceived, but let the Son of God and Mary live 
forever ! 

Banish, brother, from your head and heart these 
false Christs that have no atoning blood, and climb 



FALSE CHRISTS. 293 

by faith within sight of Calvary's gory cross. Call 
only Jesus, Christ, for in Him alone have we sal- 
vation, and in His Gospel have human govern- 
ments hope. 



The Heavenly Guest. 



THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 



Behold, I stand at the door, and knock ; if any man hear my voice, and 
open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with 
me.— Revelation III : 20. 



These words formed one of the utterances which 
fell upon the ear of the revelator on a Sabbath 
day upon the island of Patmos. With the soft 
light of an eastern Sabbath came to him the clear- 
er light of the Holy Ghost. He "was in the spirit 
on the Lord's clay." A Divine vision settled down 
upon him, the earth faded from view and Heaven 
opened all around him. As he stood thus in a sea 
of bewildering glory, he heard behind him a great 
voice, as of a trumpet, saying, "I am Alpha and 
Omega, the first and the last, and what thou seest 
write in a book and send it unto the seven church- 
es which are in Asia, unto Ephesus and unto Smyr- 
na and unto Pergamos and unto Thyatira and unto 
Sardis and unto Philadelphia and unto Laodicea." 
"And being turned, he saw seven golden candle- 
sticks, and in the midst of the seven golden can- 
dlesticks one like unto the Son of Man, clothed 
with a garment down to the foot and girt about 
the paps with a golden girdle; his head and his 

297 



298 THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 

hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and 
his eyes were as a flame of fire, and his feet like 
unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace, and 
his voice as the sound of many waters. And he 
had in his right hand seven stars; and out of his 
mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and his 
countenance was as the sun shineth in his 
strength." The vision was overpowering to St. 
John and he fell to the earth as dead. Then the 
same glorious being whom he had seen laid his 
right hand upon him, saying, "Fear not, I am the 
first and the last, I am he that liveth and was dead, 
and behold I am alive forevermore and have the 
keys of hell and of death. Write the things which 
thou hast seen and the things which are and the 
things which shall be hereafter." He then pro- 
ceeded to deliver to John a separate message for 
each of the seven churches. At the conclusion of 
the last one of these, he gives utterance to the 
sublime and astounding declaration which forms 
our text, viz. : that He who has the keys of death 
and hell, stands at the door of human hearts and 
knocks for admittance, promising if any man will 
open the door He will come in and inaugurate a 
joyous spirit festival. 

In this passage we have clearly indicated, first 
the relation which Christ, in the work of personal 



THE HEAVENLY GUEST. m 

salvation sustains to the sinner. He stands at the 
door of his heart and knocks. He neither em- 
ploys force nor subtlety to gain an entrance. He 
will not break open the door of human will or af- 
fection, nor will He secretly steal into the heart, or 
insinuate Himself into the affections in an un- 
guarded moment. With reverence we say it, He 
cannot force admittance into a human soul. He 
can speak a world from nought, He can command 
legions of angels with a single word, He can say 
to the devil "Get thee behind me, Satan," and His 
mandate must be obeyed; He can command the 
obedience and homage of all heaven's hosts, and 
make hell tremble by a nod, and can break all the 
sepulchres of earth and call their sleeping dead to 
life by a single word, but He cannot carry the cit- 
adel of one human soul by storm. The image of 
God which the Creator gave man when He gave 
him being, like the blood of the paschal lamb 
sprinkled upon the doorposts in Egypt, forbids all 
violence upon the soul within. Jesus has left 
Heaven for us, has wrapped Himself in the robe 
of our humility, has suffered shame, insult and 
death in order to save us. He now pleads with us 
and for us and begs us to be reconciled to God. 
He shows us His dripping wounds, lets the light 
of the jewelled crown, which He holds out to our 



30o THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 

acceptance, sparkle in our eye; He comes to the 
very door of our heart and whispers His love to 
us but there He must stop and there He must 
stand until man unbars his soul and lets Him in. 
His scepter over human hearts is love, not force. 
He can woo and importune forever, but coerce 
never. 

The law of England protects as sacred the rights 
of every man's home and make its occupant su- 
preme ruler within its walls. A British orator has 
said in substance that each man's home is his cas- 
tle — no matter though it be but a hovel. The 
stars may look down through its broken roof upon 
the family circle; the rain and the winds of Heav- 
en may enter it at every crevice, but the king can- 
not ; he dare not. The human soul is man's castle 
and he is lord of it. It may be all in ruins. Evil 
may crawl among its broken columns and arches 
at will, leaving the slime of its trail in its most sa- 
cred courts; temptation may enter at every door 
and window and whistle with irresistible fury 
through all its corridors and turrets. But the 
King of high Heaven cannot enter until man 
opens the door and invites him in. When Jesus 
stands at the door and knocks, He does all that 
God in His omnipotence can do to save us. He 
does not knock once and then leave us forever. It 



THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 301 

is no hurried rapping that the Savior makes at our 
heart as He quietly passes us by. No, He stops 
and "stands at the door and knocks." Patiently 
He waits and knocks again and again. Some- 
times He calls softly and gently says, "Son. daugh- 
ter, give me thy heart," at other times He knocks 
loudly and thunders in our heavy ears, "Prepare 
to meet thy God." Now His rappings sound like 
the silvery notes of a shepherd's bell calling the 
lambs of the flock to His arms, and anon they 
sound like the trumpets of judgment summoning a 
world to its final account. He knocks by His 
spirit and troubles our sleep. There are times 
when we cannot tell why it is that we are so much 
troubled on account of sins and feel so much our 
need of a Savior. Our hearts unaccountably yearn 
after an indwelling Christ at times when all is pros- 
perous around us and no warning voice is heard. 
It is God's Spirit knocking with a soft hand at the 
door of our conscience. Again Christ knocks by 
His providences. When He crowns the fields with 
yellow harvests and whitens the hills with skipping 
flocks, when store houses are full and health and 
plenty fill the home with gladness, Jesus then is 
standing with the wand of prosperity in His hands, 
knocking at the door of your heart. "The good- 
ness of God leadeth us to repentance." If we hear 



302 THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 

not this, He then knocks with the iron knuckles 
of adverse fortune and in that knocking we may 
hear the crackling of burning houses, the cries of 
want and distress, the Peter-like denial of former 
friends, turned false; aye, we may hear in it the 
clatter of the bier, the rumbling of the hearse, and 
falling of clods in new-made graves. Very often the 
bolts and bars of a hard heart that could be opened 
by no other means, give way beneath this kind of 
knocking. Jesus will not give over His efforts to 
save the soul until He has employed the last re- 
source at His command, and hence, if neither His 
blood nor His blessing will win for Him admit- 
tance, He withdraws the shield of His protection 
for awhile to make us feel our helplessness and 
dependence in order that we may become willing 
to accept His aid. "He does not willingly afflict 
us." "Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth. ,, 
He makes us weep only in order that tears may 
wash the film from our eyes so that we may see 
Him as He is. He makes our hearts bleed only 
to reduce the worldly fever that is consuming us 
and driving us mad. If He knocks loudly it is be- 
cause He sees the imminence of our danger and is 
painfully anxious to save us. 

O, how long the blessed Savior has been stand- 
ing at the door of our hearts and knocking ! He 



THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 303 

stood there in childhood's happy hours and said 
"Suffer little children to come unto Me and forbid 
them not, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." 
He was there all through the thoughtless, careless 
years of youth, whispering, "They that seek me 
early shall find me." He is there still in the day 
of our mature manhood, saying, "Come now, let 
us reason together; though your sins be as scarlet 
I will make them like wool, and though they be 
red like crimson I will make them whiter than 
snow." Aye, with some of us He has been stand- 
ing there until age has silvered our heads and fur- 
rowed our cheeks, and now in our declining years 
He calls and asks, "How long halt ye between two 
opinions?" "Turn ye, turn ye, for why will you 
die?" Methinks I see Him standing at the door 
of the hearts which are barred and bolted against 
Him. His locks are wet with the dews of the 
night, His hands are bleeding with repeated 
knocking, His voice has grown hoarse with cease- 
less pleading; there is a tear in His eye and a tear 
in His tone, as looking upward to His Father He 
exclaims, "I came unto my own and my own re- 
ceived me not." "They will not come unto me 
that they might have life." "Father, forgive them 
for they know not what they do." 



304 THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 

Let us now turn to inquire what the text teaches 
in regard to man's duty and responsibility in the 
work of his personal salvation. "If any man hear 
my voice and open the door, I will come in," says 
Jesus. Man is here represented as occupying the 
inside of an impregnable fortress and as having the 
power to defy Jesus to enter. Man's power of re- 
sistence against Divine influence is next to omni- 
potent. Even the cross cannot break the shield of 
one stubborn human will. Man can, if he will, be 
damned, in spite of all that God can do to save 
him. Jesus may stand and knock at the door of 
his heart until death turns the lock and takes the 
key, but if man closes his ears against his voice and 
refuses to open the door, he will go down to the 
grave with no more of God or of hope in his soul 
than if the Savior had not died. All the lessons 
taught by pious parents, all the prayers of the 
Christian church, all the warnings of God's holy 
word, all the influences of the Holy Spirit, all the 
teachings of Providence and all the pleadings of a 
Savior's blood and love are powerless to make one 
breach in the citadel of the soul that wills to be 
lost. One human will, even though it be the fee- 
blest one on earth, can take its stand upon the 
very verge of hell and triumphantly defy all the 
angelic armies of God and even the omnipotent 



THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 305 

arm of Jehovah Himself to snatch it from the jaws 
of death. If man will not open the door, Jesus 
never can come in. If you will not be saved, 
there is no power in the universe to prevent your 
being damned. 

But while man is thus armed with a power that 
can certainly condemn, he has no power by which, 
independent of Christ, he can be saved. He can 
keep Christ out, but he cannot compel Christ to 
come in. Man can change his appearance so that 
the beggar shall look like a king; he can change 
his life so that the vile sinner shall appear pure and 
moral; he can even change his mind, so that the 
ignorant poor shall become the learned savant, 
but he cannot change his heart. "Can the Ethio- 
pian change his skin or the leopard his spots? 
Then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to 
do evil," says God's word. We sometimes talk of 
our good deeds and much more frequently think 
of them, as fitting us in some sense for a home in 
Heaven. When Jesus asks admission to the soul, 
we sometimes reply that we go to church, we read 
the Bible, we observe the Sabbath, we deal hon- 
estly, we are moral people. We fondly dream that 
these things are an equivalent to, and are a substi- 
tute for, repentance and faith. Perhaps we do not 
realize the truth, but every time we thus rely upon 



3 u6 THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 

what we can do, for salvation, we as certainly re^ 
ject Christ as our Savior as did the Jews who cried 
"Away with Him ! Crucify Him ! Crucify Him !" 
Let us not be deceived, "there is no other name 
under Heaven given among men whereby we must 
be saved, but the name of Jesus Christ." There 
is no substitute for the blood of crucifixion. Of 
all the white robed throng that the revelator saw 
in Heaven, there was not one who had not washed 
his robe and made it white in the blood of the 
Lamb. There is no such thing as cleansing a soul 
from sin except by admitting Christ into it. The 
poet had the inspiration of Scripture when he 
sung, "Jesus, thy blood, thy blood alone, hath 
power sufficient to atone." With Christ excluded 
from the heart, "all our righteousness is but as 
filthy rags" before God — it is only "as sounding 
brass or a tinkling cymbal." We have seen that 
Jesus can not save the soul without man's consent, 
and it is just as certain that man is powerless to 
save himself without divine assistance. 

It is only when God and man join hands and 
work together that salvation is possible. Jesus 
has His part to perform and we have ours. It is 
His to stand at the door and knock, and it is ours 
to hear His voice and open the door. 



THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 307 

We must first hear His voice, we must read His 
word or hear it read. I do not mean simply that we 
must run our eyes along the sacred page or be 
within the sound of some voice that is repeating 
the sacred text; I mean to read or hear God's word 
with a mind open to conviction and eager for its 
teachings. The Greek text of the New Testament 
gives exactly what it is to hear aright. In the pas- 
sage, "If he hear thee, well, but if he will not hear 
thee, tell it to the church," etc., the original reads : 
"If he hear thee, well, but if he hear thee to one 
side, tell it to the church." In both cases the man 
heard, but only in the one he listened. When he 
hears to one side or when he hears with no inten- 
tion to heed, the translators render it very prop- 
erly "not hearing." It is true with wonderful 
exactness that the man who thus hears, does not 
hear Christ's voice. He may hear the voice of 
the person speaking to him, but he does not hear 
the voice of the Master who speaks to and through 
the person. If we would hear Christ's voice, we 
must have a willing, eager, attentive heart when we 
read or listen to the word of God. But God 
speaks not only through His word to man — He 
has a thousand voices or rather thousands of His 
works echo the one clear voice of God. He speaks 

30 



3o8 THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 

through all His providences to us and nature all 
around us is vocal with His pleadings and His 
warnings. If we are eager listeners, Christ's voice 
can be heard anywhere. A great poet has truth- 
fully said, "The contemplative mind hears tongues 
in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in 
stones and good in everything." 

To hear Christ's voice is the first duty imposed 
upon the sinner in order to his salvation, but this 
is only preparatory to another. He must next 
open the door of his heart. To hear the demand 
of Jesus without complying, is to sink the soul 
deeper in guilt instead of lifting it to salvation. 

But what is it to open the door? This implies, 
first that we must give our consent that Jesus may 
come in and take possession of our hearts. No man 
ever yet was saved, nor ever will be, without his 
own consent. It is not enough that we are will- 
ing to be saved — few indeed are not — but we must 
consent to be saved by admitting the Savior. 
Jesus came to save men from their sins, not in 
their sins. He cannot, while excluded from the 
soul, throw the mantle of His holiness over us and 
hide our sins. This would be to make us the 
"whited sepulchres" described in the Gospel, 
"beautiful without, but within full of dead men's 
bones." Christ's religion is not a convex lens that 



THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 309 

collects the rays of holiness and converges them 
upon an object, it is a central fire that radiates its 
light in every direction. It does not work from 
without inward, but, like leaven, it works from cen- 
tre to circumference. In order that the soul may 
be saved from sin, Jesus must come in and com- 
mence the work of regeneration at the very core of 
our being. To open the door, therefore, means 
that we give our consent that Jesus shall enter, fill 
and cleanse our hearts. 

But it means more ; simple consent is expressive 
of a state of indifference. We give our consent 
to things in which we feel no interest, and concern- 
ing which we have no choice. Such a state would 
be fitly described by unbolting and unbarring the 
door, without opening it to the one who knocks 
for admittance. The stranger would thus be left 
free to open the door and come in unbidden if he 
chose, or he might stand all night without, and 
neither invitation nor entreaty would tell him there 
was a welcome for him within. Christ does not 
obtrude Himself unwelcomed into the chambers 
of the soul. We must do more than unbar the 
door, we must open it, and entreat the Savior to 
make our soul His home. The soul that would be 
saved must not be indifferent in regard to Christ's 
entrance. It must not throw the responsibility of 



3io THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 

its salvation upon the Savior — it must be earnest, 
anxious, importunate that Jesus should come in. 

Again, to open the door implies an open recep- 
tion of the Master. Christ never enters a soul 
clandestinely, however much we may desire, and 
however strongly we may plead for it. He will not 
come in by any private, secret entrance. He must 
be an honored guest, openly received and openly 
confessed or He must stand without forever. So 
long as the soul is ashamed of its guest and seeks 
some secluded spot or some unnoticed time to ad- 
mit Him, Jesus' presence will never gladden its 
gloomy portals. The maddest thing that man 
ever does is to be ashamed of Christ. 

"Ashamed of Jesus ! Just as soon 
Let midnight be ashamed of noon." 

Not until we throw wide open the door of 
the soul, that the world may see its desolateness, 
and are willing that Jesus may enter, while mil- 
lions are gazing, to gild its mouldy wails with the 
glory of His smile, need we expect the Prince of 
Peace either to come in or to cease His knocking. 

Lastly, to open the door, implies that doubt and 
distrust of the person asking admittance have giv- 
en place to faith and confidence. We do not ad- 
mit to our homes persons in regard to whose char- 
acter we entertain distrust or suspicion. Against 



THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 311 

all such the door is closed. Not until we are as- 
sured of their character and feel that we can trust 
them and repose confidence in them do we wel- 
come them to the family circle. So also must 
faith and affection throw their arms round the 
Savior when He enters the soul to assure Him of 
welcome. Aye, faith must throw open the door 
and extend a warm hand to Jesus saying: 

"Come in, come in, thou heavenly Guest, 

Nor hence again remove ; 
But sup with us and let the feast 

Be everlasting love." 

In the moment that man thus throws open the 
door, the mighty Jesus walks in, the light of His 
countenance illuminates the dark caverns of the 
soul and the trail of His priestly robes wipes all the 
spots and stains away until even the chambers that 
were crimson with guilt are made whiter than 
snow. 

Turn we now for a brief moment to the ban- 
quet that follows the Savior's entrance. But a 
moment before the soul was a fortress, at whose 
gate were marshalled all man's forces to dispute 
Christ's entrance. Then, through all its avenues 
were heard sounds of strife and alarm. Tears, 
sighs and groans told how sad and doleful was the 



3 i2 THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 

place where Jesus was shut out. Jesus enters, and 
in a moment that soul is transformed into a festal 
hall. Garlands of flowers strew the path in which 
the Savior treads; the sword and shield of strife 
are gone and olive branches of peace wave their 
green leaves everywhere. The sounds of moaning 
and crying are hushed, and flute like notes of soft, 
sweet song are heard. The banquet board is spread 
and the first fruits of the vintage cover it over. 
There is glad thanksgiving and then there are 
sounds of mirth and feasting within. Jesus says, 
"If any man will open the door, I will come in and 
sup with him and he with me." 

I used to read this passage when a boy, think- 
ing there was tautology in it. I could see no 
difference between Christ's supping with us, 
and our supping with Him. I have long since dis- 
covered my error and have learned that the dif- 
ference is greater than that between day and night. 
Jesus first sups with us. He requires that we shall 
set before Him our choicest affections, our purest 
devotion, our most faithful obedience and claims 
them all as His right, nor will He remain in a soul 
that does not cheerfully yield them up to Him. To 
the true Christian heart Christ never comes near- 
er than when He condescends to sup with it. O, 
the thought is overpowering that Heaven's glo- 



THE HEAVENLY GUEST. 3 J 3 

rious King will come down from His throne to the 
peasant hut of our heart and will accept the rude 
fare of our poor love, worship and service. Man 
was never honored more, and Jesus never stooped 
lower than when He promised to sup with us. 

But He does not come to rob us. He will ac- 
cept the crust that alone we can offer, but when 
our scanty meal is ended, He then spreads His 
banquet board. We then shall sup with Him. 
Into our poor soul He will pour the rich 
treasure of His love; His blessings shall come 
clustering in upon us like the fruit of the 
vine, we shall partake of the nectar that makes an- 
gels strong and feast our souls upon "marrow and 
fat things." What we gave to Him was "only a 
crust of coarse, brown bread and water out of a 
wooden bowl, but with fine wheaten bread will our 
souls be fed and it is red. wine we will drink with 
our thirsting soul." We give Him our poor heart 
and, wondrous condescension, He accepts it and 
He then gives us in return the great heart of God. 
Would we be happy in a Savior's love, we must 
hear His voice when He speaks, must open the 
door when He knocks, and must give Him our 
hearts when He enters. 



The Order of Melchisedek, 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec— Hebrews VII: 17. 

These words suggest three questions, viz. : Who 
was Melchisedek ; To what order of priesthood did 
he belong, and In what respects was Jesus a priest 
of that same order? Melchisedek is mentioned but 
twice in the Old Testament Scriptures, once in the 
noth Psalm where the Psalmist, harping the 
praises of the Messiah, sings in the identical lan- 
guage of the text, "Thou art a priest forever after 
the order of Melchisedek," and once in the 14th 
chapter of Genesis where the meeting between him 
and Abraham is described. This earliest mention of 
him contains our only information concerning this 
remarkable character. We are here told that 
Chedorlaomer and his confederates having de- 
feated the Kings of Sodom and Gomorrah with 
their allies in the vale of Siddim, took Lot and his 
family among his captives and all his movable pro- 
perty among his plunder and started for home. 
Abraham upon hearing of his nephew's capture in- 
stantly collected a force and started in pursuit. 
Overtaking Chedorlaomer in the vicinity of Dan 
a bloody battle ensued in which Abraham was vic- 

3*7 



318 THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

torious. The confederate kings were utterly routed 
and Lot, his family and his goods were all retaken 
with much other rich booty. Upon Abraham's 
return the King of Sodom went out to meet him 
and congratulate him upon his victory over the 
common foe and then the account continues, "And 
Melchisedek, King of Salem, brought forth bread 
and wine, and he was the priest of the most high 
God. And he blessed him and said, Blessed be 
Abram of the most High God, possessor of heaven 
and earth, and blessed be the most High God who 
hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And 
he gave him tithes of all." All this occurred more 
than 1900 years before Christ, yet in all the inter- 
vening time not one line of authentic information 
has reached us to add to our knowledge. It is 
true that the author of the book of Hebrews men- 
tions Melchisedek several times and relates several 
things about him, but he draws all his information 
from this simple account in the book of Genesis. 
He tells us that he was "king of righteousness" and 
"king of peace." But this he gets by interpreting 
his name and the declaration in Genesis that he 
was "King of Shalam," or Salem as the word is 
rendered in English ; the word Melchisedek mean- 
ing king of righteousness and Salem meaning 
peace. He tells us moreover that Melchisedek was 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 3»9 

"without father, without mother, without descent, 
having neither beginning of days nor end of life." 
But here again he simply alludes to the record in 
Genesis. No man when the book of Hebrews was 
written pretended to know anything about Mel- 
chisedek beyond the simple record in the Old Tes- 
tament. There is no account there of his father 
or mother or descent. We are not told when he 
was born nor when he died. The statement in 
Hebrews, therefore, is simply a comment upon that 
in Genesis and amounts to nothing more than call- 
ing attention to the fact that so far as the record 
goes, and hence so far as our knowledge extends, 
he had neither father nor mother nor descent and 
was without beginning of days or end of life. 

The legend makers have been busy for thous- 
ands of years weaving strange stories to account 
for this unique character. Some have asserted 
that he was none other than Shem, who, according 
to the short chronology, was still living in the days 
of Abraham; some tell us that Melchisedek was 
the Son of God Himself, who appeared to the fath- 
er of the faithful; others among whom was the 
famous Origen declare him to have been an angel 
sent from God. One guess is as good as another 
so long as they are all without foundation and 
there is not a shadow of evidence to support any 



3 2o THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

of these conjectures. St. Jerome tells us that in 
his day in a town called Salem, near Scythopolis, 
the ruins of Melchisedek's palace were shown; but 
this was some 2300 years after the meeting of 
Abraham and Melchisedek, a sufficiently long time 
for legend to have appropriated any old ruin to 
explain a mystery. There is not the least proba- 
bility that this Salem is the one referred to in Gen- 
esis 14th, as it does not lie in the track which 
Abraham would naturally have taken in returning 
from his foray. After all, therefore, that has trans- 
pired within more than 3500 years, we have not a 
particle of trustworthy information concerning 
Melchisedek beyond the brief and simple account 
in Genesis. Three things are there affirmed of 
him; first, that he was king of righteousness, his 
name having that signification; secondly that he 
was king of Salem ; and thirdly, that he was priest 
of the most High God. Why he was named king 
of righteousness or justice we are not informed. 
Whether the name was descriptive of his personal 
character or of his official rank no intimation is 
here given. Elsewhere, however, in Scripture, we 
read of one Adonizedek, who was king of Jerusa- 
lem when the Israelites, returning from Egypt, in- 
vaded the land of Canaan. Now, Adonizedek 
means the lord of justice as Melchizedek means the 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 321 

king of justice. Since both these persons were 
kings of Jerusalem, the similarity of their names 
would seem to indicate that they were descriptive 
of their official rank or function. They point out 
not righteous or just persons, but chiefs — a king 
and a lord — of justice. They seem to be official 
titles and to designate supreme judicial authority. 
The names are about equivalent to our "Chief Jus- 
tice." If this interpretation be correct, then the 
declaration concerning Melchisedek is that he was 
Supreme Judge, King of Salem, and Priest of the 
Most High God. 

Salem was the name of the city or town origi- 
nally built upon the site since occupied by Jeru- 
salem. The name Salem means peace. Afterward, 
the city was called Jebus or Jebusi because of its 
inhabitants, the Jebusites; and finally at its con- 
quest by David it took the name of Jerusalem, 
which according to the best lexicographers signi- 
fies foundation of peace. Gesenius renders it in 
German "Friedensgrund." That Jerusalem and 
the ancient Salem are identical is rendered indubi- 
table from the language of the Psalmist where he 
sings, "In Judah is God known; his name is great 
in Israel; "In Salem also is his tabernacle and his 
dwelling place in Zion." — Ps. j6\2. It is probable 
that the city was first called Salem and afterward 



322 THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

Jerusalem from its almost impregnable position 
which secured it from attack. So strong were its 
natural defenses that the Israelites failed to take 
it until the days of David, 400 years after their en- 
trance into the promised land. It is true, we read 
in Judges 1, that Judah took it with the edge ot 
the sword and burned it, but that this was only a 
partial or temporary occupancy is clear from the 
fact that in the same chapter we are told (verse 21) 
that "The children of Benjamin did not drive out 
the Jebusites that inhabited Jerusalem; but the 
Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in 
Jerusalem unto this day." A place so strong by 
nature and fortified by art would not often be dis- 
turbed by war. Its inhabitants would dwell in 
comparative security and hence it might very pro- 
perly be named the home or ground of peace; or 
simply Salem — peace — as it was originally called. 
Of this natural stronghold Melchisedek was king, 
while at the same time he was supreme judge in 
Salem. He exercised the functions both of judge 
and king, and united in himself the legislative, exe- 
cutive and judicial departments of government. 

But he was more ; he was a priest as well as king 
and judge. He wore the mitre as well as the 
crown and the ermine, and represented both 
church and state. Just as the Czar of Russia to- 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 323 

clay is head alike of the nation and the church 
throughout all the Russias, or as the Pope of Rome 
a few years since was sovereign and pontiff over 
all the states of the church, so Melchisedek within 
his little realm represented all government — sacred 
and secular, human and divine. As Louis XIV said 
when some one spoke of the state to him, "The 
state, that is me," so Melchisedek could say, "the 
state, that is me; the church, that is me; the law, 
that is me." Such was the petty prince who met 
Abraham in the valley of Shaveh as he "returned 
from the slaughter of Chedorlaomer and the kings 
that were with him/' and placed bread and wine 
before him, received tithes of him and blessed him. 
Our chief concern at present is not with the judge 
or king, but with the priest. Our text declares 
that Christ is a priest after the order of Melchise- 
dek and the great question now before us is To 
what church did he belong, and Of what order of 
priesthood was Melchizedek? 

He did not belong to the Aaronic priesthood 
nor to the Levitical order; for the tribe of Levi 
and the house of Aaron were as yet unborn. He 
was not a priest of any Jewish order, for he was 
contemporary with Abraham, the father of the 
Jewish nation. He was not an idolater and did 
21 



324 THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

not belong to the priesthood of any false religion. 
He is styled a "priest of the Most High God." 
This title is never given in Scripture to any god of 
any false religion. Eleven times the phrase "The 
Most High God" occurs in Scripture and in every 
case it designates Jehovah, the only true God. 
Melchisedek was, therefore, a priest of the true re- 
ligion, officiating at the altar of the true God, ages 
before the law was given to Moses, or the Jewish 
church established on the Aaronic priesthood, in- 
situted, and we must therefore look for the order 
to which he belonged, back of the call of Abraham, 
among the patriarchal tribes, while as yet the ark 
of the covenant was entrusted to no one chosen 
nation. We mistake if we suppose that God's 
church originated with the giving of the law and 
the building of the tabernacle, or even with the 
call of Abraham. Had God no church on the 
earth and was there no true religion from the fall 
of man down to the call of Abraham, some 1900 
years B. C? Then how came Enoch to walk so 
close with God that he simply "was not for God 
took him"? And how came Noah to build an al- 
tar upon the land yet slimy with the ooze of the 
flood, and offer sacrifice upon it? Who were the 
sons of God who married the daughters of men 
mentioned in Gen. 6:2-4, and who were "the sons 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 325 

of God who came to present themselves before 
the Lord" spoken of in Job 1-6? The truth is, 
God has never been without a people on the earth 
and His church was never without a human priest- 
hood from the fall until the crucifixion. Before 
the Jewish, was the primitive church and the pa- 
triarchal religion. Does any one ask when these 
were instituted? Go back to the account of the 
fall and you shall find that the moment our first 
parents were cast out of the garden, another way 
of access to God was provided. We are told that 
God placed at the eastern gate of Eden "cherubim 
and a flaming sword which turned every way to 
keep the way of the tree of life." These cherubim 
were not angels as is generally supposed, nor did 
either or both of them brandish a flashing sword. 
The words cherub and cherubim are never used in 
Scripture to designate angels. They never occur 
after this first mention of them until God instruct- 
ed Moses to make the ark of the covenant for the 
tabernacle. He then commands Moses to make 
"a mercy seat of pure gold" and "two cherubim of 
gold, of beaten work" "in the two ends of the mer- 
cy seat;" "and the cherubim shall stretch forth 
their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with 
their wings and their faces shall look one to anoth- 
er." These were not angels nor any other living 



326 THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

creatures, but images of gold. They were not sta- 
tues of men or of angels, for in the tables of the 
law which were to be kept in the ark, the Israelites 
were expressly forbidden to make unto themselves 
"any graven image or any likeness of anything 
that is in Heaven above or that is in the earth 
beneath or that is in the water under the earth." 
Moses is not told what a cherub is or in what form 
to make it. He is supposed to know all about it. 
If they were anything but birds or insects they 
must have been composite figures, for no other 
animals have wings. But birds or insects they 
could not be, for the commandment forbade the 
making the likeness of them. They were metallic 
figures, therefore, made up of parts of differ- 
ent animals. They may have been in the form of 
men with the wings of a bird. Or they might 
have a human body with a lion's head and with the 
feet of oxen; but whatever other parts they had, 
they must have wings. Ezekiel 1 :6 tells us that 
he saw in his vision cherubim "and every one had 
four faces and every one had four wings . . . and 
the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot 
. . . .they had the face of a man and the face of a 
lion, the face of an ox and the face of an eagle.' , 
Moses' residence in Egypt would make him famil- 
iar with these composite figures; for winged lions 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 327 

and sphinxes abounded in the valley of the Nile. 
It is Moses who tells us that he made cherubim on 
the mercy seat and it is he also who tells us that 
God placed cherubim at the east of Eden after our 
first parents were expelled. If the cherubim on 
the mercy seat were simply composite images 
those outside Eden were the same. But some one 
will ask, did they not brandish swords, and if so 
were they not living beings? To which I answer 
that the account makes no such statement. It 
reads God placed "two cherubim and a flaming 
sword which turned every way." There were two 
cherubim and only one sword. Which one wielded 
it, if either? It is said that the sword turned every 
way — not that either cherub turned it. The cher- 
ubim whatever they were had no control of the 
sword. But a careful examination of the Hebrew 
will lead us to doubt the translation in our version. 
The word translated "sword" is descriptive, not 
of the metal or shape of such a weapon, but of the 
effect produced by it and means strictly "a de- 
stroyer," "a devourer." As the sword spoken of 
was not of metal but of flame, the passage may be 
rendered "a flaming destroyer," or "a devouring 
flame," and the meaning would be that between the 
cherubim there glowed a fierce, devouring fire. But 
no matter whether we render the phrase "a flam- 



323 THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

ing sword" or "a devouring flame" we shall reach 
substantially the same conclusion. For if it was 
a flaming sword turning every way, then it was a 
leaping, darting, flashing fire. The inevitable con- 
clusion, therefore, is that what God placed at the 
east of Eden was an altar having two composite 
figures called cherubim, with a fierce fire between 
them darting its swordlike tongues of flame in 
every direction. Here then was the first altar of 
religion and its establishment was contemporan- 
eous with the fall. 

At the same time there must have been a revela- 
tion given to the fallen pair beyond what is re- 
corded in Genesis, else they had not known the 
meaning of this altar or that there was any access 
to God, much less could they have known what 
kind of sacrifices would be accepted. But they did 
know that the fire upon this altar represented the 
divine presence and that they had access through 
the blood of sacrifice, for "in process of time Cain 
and Abel brought an offering unto the Lord." And 
that they had been instructed what kind of offering 
to bring is clear from what God said to Cain upon 
the occasion. Cain, who had brought of the fruit 
of the field, was enraged to find his offering reject- 
ed while Abel's lamb was accepted and God ex 
postulates with him after this manner: "Why art 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 329 

thou wroth, and why is thy countenance fallen? If 
thou doest well shalt thou not be accepted? and if 
thou doest not well sin lieth at thy door." In 
plain English this is saying, It is useless to be an*, 
gry. You have nobody to blame but yourself. If 
you had brought the right kind of an offering you 
would have been accepted, and if you did not you 
committed a sin, for you knew what you ought to 
bring. This language clearly implies that with the 
establishment of the altar on the east of Eden a 
revelation had been given to man, teaching him 
that here again he might have access to God and 
might approach Him that dwelleth between the 
cherubim, but that he might come near to that 
God who now reveals Himself as "a consuming 
fire" only through the blood of sacrifice. It was 
revealed to him, moreover, that the only sacrifice 
acceptable to God was "the firstling of his flock," 
symbol of the "Lamb of God slain from the foun- 
dation of the world." Here, then, we have the 
first altar and the primitive religion of humanity, 
divinely instituted coincident with the fall. Here 
at the eastern gate of Eden the first families of men 
brought their bleeding lambs and offered them in 
sacrifice to propitiate "Him that dwelleth between 
the cherubim" and God then, as in Elijah's case, 
answered by fire and accepted their offerings. 



^ 3 o THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

As population multiplied and people, in conse- 
quence, moved farther from Eden, in course of 
time it became impossible for all to return to this 
altar to perform their acts of worship. And so 
they made copies of the cherubim and took them 
with them and in their new abodes erected altars 
in imitation of the original. The necessities of 
the case in the absence of any information to the 
contrary, would force us to believe that this was 
done; but we are not left to unsupported conjec- 
ture. The sleepless dragon which kept watch at 
the Garden of Hesperedes and the dragon which 
guarded the golden fleece against the Argonauts 
in Greek mythology; the existence of winged 
lions, of oxen with eagles' heads and wings, and of 
human figures with the heads of birds or dogs, 
now found in the ruined temples of Egypt and 
Assyria together with the double-faced gods of 
India, many of them antedating the days of Moses, 
are conclusive proof that copies of the original 
cherubim with many variations, had been made 
wherever man had wandered. The difference be- 
tween true and false worship in patriarchal times 
seems to have been this: the people of God wor- 
shiped an invisible Deity, symbolized by the 
shekinah between the cherubim, while idolaters 
paid their worship to an image which they set up 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 33* 

in place of the shekinah. Both had the cherubim 
in their temples. The one regarded them only as 
husks surrounding a kernel of fire or as a taber- 
nacle in which the Divine presence abode. The 
other looked upon them simply as adjuncts to the 
image placed between them. There was no mys- 
terious Divine presence to be guarded and shel- 
tered by them and so the people were content to 
worship an idol, the work of men's hands and to 
ignore the presence of a spiritual God. In course 
of time idolatry departed farther and farther from 
the original religion, made images of any creature, 
set them up and called them gods, and bowed in 
worship before them. But all men were not idol- 
aters and there is good reason to believe that the 
original form of worship was never lost, but that 
in every age holy men bowed before copies of the 
Edenic altar and worshiped God under the sym- 
bol of a "consuming fire." It was thus that Moses 
recognized his Maker in the burning bush and the 
children of Israel in the pillar of fire. When God 
commanded Moses to make the mercy seat with 
its hovering cherubim, He revealed no new reli- 
gion to man, but only restored the original. The 
mercy seat with its cherubim and glowing sheki- 
nah was only a copy of the two cherubim and the 
flaming sword which was first erected just outside 



332 THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

Eden's gate. There was no need that Moses 
should be told in what form to make the cherubim 
for through all the ages these figures had been 
preserved and their form was familiar. Up to this 
time God's people had been scattered abroad with- 
out unity and with no center of worship. 

The institution of the Jewish church consisted 
in calling a special people, in restoring the primi- 
tive worship, in giving the ark of His covenant to 
a unified church and in making first the tabernacle 
and afterward the temple the religious center of 
the nation. Israel had been in bondage in Egypt 
and the religion of their fathers had suffered from 
contact with idolatry. Hence a new revelation 
was necessary. But it was not a revelation of a 
new religion — it was only the re-enactment and 
restoration of the old one. From Adam to Moses 
God's chosen ones had bowed before that same 
mercy seat and gazed upon that same awful sheki- 
nah and worshiped "Him that dwelleth between 
the cherubim." 

At first every man was his own priest, as we 
learn from the cases of Cain and Abel, who brought 
each his own sacrifice unto the Lord. But as peo- 
ple multiplied, the father of each family became 
the priest of his own household, e. g., Noah built 
an altar and offered sacrifice for his family upon 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 333 

the land just emerged from the flood. As families 
in course of time were united into tribes, and these 
in turn were merged into nations, the chief of the 
tribe or the king of the nation became the high 
priest of his people. Even as late as the exodus 
Moses exercised the functions of both king and 
priest until God separated between them by ap- 
pointing Aaron to the priesthood. Melchisedek 
was such a royal priest of the Most High God. In 
those olden times the church of God was a unity. 
Among those who rejected idolatry there was but 
one God, one cult, and one priesthood. Melchis- 
edek, standing before the original altar with its 
cherubic guardians and consuming fire, was a 
priest of the patriarchal church and of the primi- 
tive religion. Antedating the Aaronic priesthood 
and the selection of Israel to be God's chosen peo- 
ple and even the call of Abraham to be the father 
of the faithful, he stands in the undivided patriarch- 
al church as the sacerdotal representative of all 
God's people everywhere. He belongs to the 
priesthood of humanity in the original and ever- 
lasting church of the Most High God. 

The question now occurs, in what respects was 
Christ a priest of the same order as Melchisedek? 
In the first place, Christ belongs to that order of 
priesthood because he antedates the Jewish reli- 



334 THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

gioii and all specialized forms of worship. We 
are told in Scripture that "God sent forth His Son, 
made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem 
them that were under the law," but we greatly mis- 
take if we suppose His priesthood to date only 
from the incarnation. He was born of a woman, 
but He was older than His mother. He was made 
under the law, to redeem them that were under 
the law, but He lived before the law was given. He 
came to redeem them that were under the law, but 
His redeeming work did not begin with His birth. 
It was already hoary with age at the nativity. 
Mary little dreamed as she hugged her new-born 
babe to her heart that she was holding in her arms 
the "ancient of days," but Jesus Himself declares, 
"Before Abraham was I am," and John asserts "In 
the beginning was the Word and the Word was 
with God and the Word was God and the Word 
w T as made flesh and dwelt among us." Does the 
world esteem Him David's son, "How then doth 
David in spirit call Him Lord? saying, the Lord 
said unto my Lord sit thou on my right hand until 
I make thine enemies thy footstool." "All things 
were made by Him and without Him was not any- 
thing made that was made." It was He, as the 
voice of the Lord God, who walked with our first 
parents in Eden in the cool of the day. It was 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 335 

He who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, 
and moved in a pillar of cloud by day and of fire 
by night before the Israelitish host, and walked 
with the three Hebrew children over the coals of 
the fiery furnace. All along the ages His presence 
has been manifest in the church and without it the 
church would be empty and meaningless as sound- 
ing brass or a tinkling cymbal. Calvary's gory 
tragedy was no new act in the drama of redemp- 
tion. It was only the lifting of the curtain that 
men might behold what the Son of God had al- 
ways suffered for our race. Not then for the first 
time was he "wounded for our transgressions and 
bruised for our iniquities." The moment man 
sinned, Jesus bared His bosom to the knife as our 
sin offering. He was "the Lamb of God slain 
from the foundation of the world." He was not 
only the sacrifice but the priest as well. Standing 
between the cheubim robed in flame upon that first 
altar at the eastern gate of Eden, He offered Him- 
self as the only sufficient sacrifice for the sin of the 
world. The glory and the saving efficiency of His 
offering was that it was voluntary. The Psalmist 
heard and recorded the shout that made all Heav- 
en ring "Sacrifice and offering thou didst not de- 
sire .... burnt offering and sin offering hast thou 
not required, then said I, lo ! I come, in the volume 



336 THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy 
will, O my God." He was not put to death by 
men. To prevent just this mistake He tells us, 
"No man taketh my life from me. I lay it down 
of myself. I have power to lay it down and I have 
power to take it again." In His priestly office He 
was "without father, without mother, without de- 
scent, without beginning of days or end of life." 
For He was before all, priest of the Most High 
God throughout all ages. 

Again, like Melchisedek, He holds the reins of 
all government in His hand and is at one and the 
same time "The Lord of righteousness," "the 
Prince of peace" and the "Head of the church." 
At His birth the magi asked where is He that is 
born King of the Jews? They were looking for 
the long promised and long expected King of 
Salem, and lo, at last He had come ; for the angels 
shouted over Judea's plains, "Glory to God in the 
highest and on earth peace, good will to men ; for 
unto you is born this day in the City of David a 
Savior which is Christ the Lord." He came to set 
up an everlasting kingdom and was put to death 
at last because He declared Himself a King. But 
His kingdom was not of this world — it was an em- 
pire of peace. Just before mounting to the throne 
of all empire, hear Him whisper, "Peace I leave 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 337 

with you, my peace I give unto you." He is not 
only King, but also Judge. "All judgment has 
been committed to the Son. And "we must all 
appear before the judgment seat of Christ that 
every one may receive the things done in his body 
according to that he hath done whether it be good 
or bad." He sits upon the bench as well as on the 
throne and weighs with even-handed justice the 
affairs of men. His empire is peace and His court 
is righteousness. Hence we are exhorted to seek 
first the kingdom of God and His righteousness." 
Need it be added that He embodies all authority 
in the church and is the one priest of the Most 
High God? Why, "there is no other name given 
under heaven and among men whereby we must 
be saved, but the name of Jesus Christ." "There 
is but one Mediator between God and man — the 
Man Christ Jesus." He tells us Himself, "No man 
cometh to the Father but by me." By me, if any 
man enter in, he shall go in and out and find pas- 
ture." No wonder that the revelator when he saw 
Heaven opened tells us that he beheld One who 
"was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood and 
His name is called The Word of God," and that 
"on His head were many crowns," for all power is 
given unto Him in Heaven and in earth. 



338 THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

Finally, like Melchisedek, He is the representa- 
tive of all mankind. The Son of God while upon 
earth delighted to be called the Son of Man. But 
that title in English is ambiguous — in any other 
language it is big with meaning. In English we 
have but one word to express "man," the male sex 
and "man" meaning mankind as distinguished 
from brutes. In all other languages there are two 
words, and whenever Jesus is called the Son of 
Man the one meaning mankind is employed. The 
son of the male sex He was not in any sense, but 
the son of mankind He was in the broadest sense 
of the term. 

There was something in the Hebrew besides 
the Jew, there was something in the Hellenist 
besides the Greek, there was something in the 
Latin besides the Roman. That something was 
essential man. Beneath all differences of color, 
race, nationality and language there is something 
common to the human species the wide world over 
— it is common humanity. Well, Jesus Christ was 
not the son of the Jew or the Greek or the Roman 
— He was the Son of Man. As Adam was the 
father of all races, so Jesus was the common Son 
of them all. Adam was the fountain whence all 
the racial stream flowed; Christ was the reservoir 
into which they were all again gathered. There is 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 339 

nothing tribal or ethnic or racial about Him — He 
is simply a man — the representative of our com- 
mon humanity. He belongs to no country or 
clime or time. He is the Son of Humanity through- 
out all ages. 

In His priesthood, like Melchisedek, He stands 
at the altar of a common religion for all our race, 
representing mankind, not in its accidental divi- 
sions, but in its essential unity. Here there is 
neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor fe- 
male, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. The 
Aaronic priesthood was a narrow, local, temporary 
institution and must pass away — that of Melchise- 
dek was built upon the bed rock of human nature 
and must be as immortal as man. The Christian 
religion is only the original religion re-enacted and 
Jesus as the Head of the church is a priest forever 
after the order of Melchisedek. 

The cherubic altar, the shekinah and the priest- 
hood of Melchisedek have all vanished from the 
church on earth, but their significance has not been 
destroyed. They have only disappeared by being 
swallowed up in fulfillment. We will see them 
again by and by in grander forms and shrouded in 
deeper and more glorious mystery. The frag- 
mentary truths of all false religions and the various 
22 



34Q THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

dispensations of the true, from Adam to the end 
of time will be harmonized and unified when the 
church of all ages and lands is gathered together 
in God's Paradise above. In Eden the altar was 
set up in the eastern gate and man could only ap- 
proach it from without. Then there were but two 
cherubim because the altar faced only one way. 
In Paradise regained the altar is within and it faces 
all the cardinal points of the compass, because the 
redeemed are to come up from the east and the 
west and from the north and the south and sit 
down in the kingdom of God. The altar now has 
four faces with four cherubim guarding its mys- 
teries and glories. In stead of the shekinah, the 
symbol of Deity, the great I Am is there Himself, 
blazing with a "glory which excelleth." At the 
first altar the church had no representative, be- 
cause the church was then inchoate. Around the 
final altar are four and twenty elders who lead the 
sacramental host of God's elect in worship. But 
with all these variations, as the revelator lifts the 
curtain and gives us a glimpse of the church tri- 
umphant in worship, we readily recognize the old 
altar before which the patriarchs bowed, with its 
cherubim and shekinah and bleeding Lamb, and 
the Priest after the order of Melchisedek antedat- 
ing all priesthoods, embodying all authority and 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 341 

representing all races, is still before the altar. Hear 
the revelator as the Apocalypse unrolls itself be- 
fore him. "Behold a throne was set in Heaven 
and one sat on the throne, and He that sat was to 
look upon like jasper and a sardine stone, and 
there was a rainbow round about the throne in 
sight like unto an emerald. And round about the 
throne were four and twenty seats and upon the 
seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed 
in white raiment and they had on their heads 
crowns of gold. And out of the throne proceeded 
lightnings and thunderings and voices and there 
were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne 
which are the seven spirits of God. And before 
the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal 
and in the midst of the throne; and round about 
the throne were four beasts full of eyes before and 
behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and 
the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had 
a face as a man and the fourth beast was like a fly- 
ing eagle. And the four beasts had each of them 
six wings about him and they were full of eyes 
within; and they rest not day and night, saying, 
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty which was 
and is and is to come. And I beheld, and lo, in 
the midst of the throne and of the four beasts and 
in the midst of the elders stood a Lamb as it had 



342 THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 

been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes 
which are the seven spirits of God sent forth into 
all the earth. And he came and took the book out 
of the right hand of Him that sat on the throne. 
And when he had taken the book, the four beasts 
and four and twenty elders fell down before the 
Lamb, having every one of them harps and golden 
vials full of odors which are the prayers of saints, 
And they sung a new song, saying : Thou art wor- 
thy to take the book and to open the seals* there- 
of; for thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to 
God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue 
and people and nation, and hast made us unto our 
God kings and priests." 

The vision is marvelous, but its features are fa- 
miliar. There is the old altar with God in glory 
sitting upon it, and with the cherubim (beasts with 
wings) standing guard around it. There are the 
worshipers and the sacrificial Lamb. But where is 
the priest who at one and the same time can repre- 
sent the church of all ages and all lands, in all its 
dispensations? The book of ritual is there, but 
who can open it and conduct the services so that 
all may understand? Lo, there He stands with 
garments dipped in blood — the Son of Man. For 
"behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root 
of David, hath prevailed to open the book and to 



THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDEK. 343 

loose the seven seals thereof." No wonder that 
the chorus broke from ten thousand times ten 
thousand lips, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain 
to receive power and riches and wisdom and 
strength and honor and glory and blessing." "As 
it was in the beginning it now and ever shall be, 
world without end. Amen." 



JUL 1 1901 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process,. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2006 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





017 731 371 3 4 



